The night before final bids were due on the sale of Learfield, CEO Greg Brown gathered up the six other members of his senior management team and they went to dinner at Perry’s Steakhouse.
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Greg Brown, Learfield’s chief executive, quizzed his top lieutenants about the bidders and the future.
Photo by: SAM ANISE / BEAUX ARTS PHOTOGRAPHY
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Brown reserved a private room for the group at the trendy Frisco, Texas, restaurant, just up the road from Learfield’s headquarters in Plano. Before their meals arrived, Brown played “Popcorn,” an exercise where each executive says what’s on his mind and ideas bounce around the room like popping popcorn.
With the company on the eve of its third sale in five years, Learfield’s chief executive wanted feedback. How did his top lieutenants feel about the sale, the bidders and the future?
“I took notes,” Brown said. “I wanted everyone’s voice to be heard.”
That Oct. 3 night was the last time all seven of them were in the same room before the company was sold to Atairos Group for $1.3 billion.
“Some of what was said was helpful and some of it was surprising,” Brown said without revealing the specific comments. “But the main thing was that we’re all in this together.”
As the deal played out through the week and the company was sold in the early morning hours of Oct. 8, Brown traveled from Plano to Los Angeles, the site of Moelis & Co.’s offices, to Salt Lake City, where he and his wife attended a family function. Moelis & Co. ran the sale.
The other principal dealmakers stayed close to their home offices as they negotiated final deal points.
Michael Dominguez, a Providence Equity managing director who led the Learfield sale for the private equity, was back in Providence, where the Rhode Island firm is based.
Atairos CEO Mike Angelakis, who was handpicked by Comcast to run the new holding company and engineered the $1.3 billion bid, was in a New York office.
As it became apparent that Atairos would win the bid late that night, Brown and Dominguez spoke twice more. The two had worked together for the past three years turning Learfield into a company capable of generating such a dizzying price.
In each conversation, Dominguez asked Brown if he was sure he wanted to do the deal. The sale was technically Providence’s to execute, but Dominguez wouldn’t pull the trigger until Learfield’s chief was certain. That’s indicative of how they collaborated during the past three years, Brown said. Dominguez, despite his fiduciary responsibility to Providence’s investors, knew how important it was to keep Learfield’s management team intact and involved, and he was committed to it.
“It has been the most unbelievable professional experience of my lifetime,” Brown said of their working relationship. “It really has been.”
When the deal went down at around 3 a.m. on the East Coast, none of the parties were in the same room. The dramatic “Barbarians at the Gate” style of sale, where buyers are shuffled in and out of offices through a backdoor, never came into play for this Learfield sale.
“The days of everybody being in one room is more for the movies,” Brown said.
It’ll take four to six weeks before the Atairos acquisition officially closes, but it will start to feel real this week. That’s when Atairos’ leadership will visit Learfield’s headquarters in Plano and go to dinner at Brown’s home.
The next day they’ll have breakfast at the office and meet the Plano staff before heading off to Jefferson City, Mo., to visit another Learfield office and meet with Clyde Lear, the retired founder of the company.
Brown took Providence executives on the same guided tour three years ago and it helped “remove any mystery,” he said.
“We’re still going to be significant owners,” Brown said of the senior management team, which comprises chief business development officer Bob Agramonte, chief communications officer Roger Gardner, CFO Matt Hupfeld, COO Marc Jenkins, chief revenue officer Andy Rawlings, chief legal officer John Raleigh and Brown.
“Nobody’s looking to exit the business. Management wants to be active, we love what we do and we want to keep going.”
