Clay Hunter (00:05):
I grew up in St. Louis. After college, I moved to Chicago, went into investment banking. 2003, I moved
back to St. Louis and went to work for one of the oldest and most successful traditional private equity
firms in the country. 2015, I had an opportunity to continue doing what I love, doing private equity, like
things I was doing, but to do it not in a traditional fund, but to do it for a wealthy family. So moved to
Arkansas, moved to Little Rock, and kept doing what I was doing, trying to find and buy and build
businesses.
Jason Logsdon (00:36):
I grew up on a farm and went to college to be a veterinarian and transitioned into business. Found my way
to Merrill Lynch in investment banking in Chicago in 1998 where I met Clay. I left to become CFO of
Maschhoff Family Foods, where I met Ken and Julie and Dave and Karen Maschhoff, and I spent 13
years there culminating and being CEO of the business in 2012.
Clay Hunter (01:02):
It was a wonderful training. You learned a lot about things that are important to us still today and what we
do, but we learned a lot about, we learned some things we didn’t want to do.
Jason Logsdon (01:13):
I’d always thought about working with Clay, but it was subconscious. I didn’t know it until 2020 when we
talked, and I think to myself, wait a minute. I know what we want to do five to 10 years from now, and
Clay’s the perfect guy. I’ve always said that. So I sent him a text.
Clay Hunter (01:29):
It says a crazy idea, 11 out of 10 on the crazy scale, give me a call. Won’t take but a second. He says,
listen, I know you got a lot going on right now in the world. There’s a lot going on in the world right now,
but I cannot take this moment to run an idea by you. Those conversations were the beginnings of
Broadview.
Alex Kuhlman (01:55):
I think back to 2020 when I first met Clay and Jason, and they outlined the vision for Broadview over the
next 15 years. Their approach to direct investing was in its purest form and it was highly independent, and
that was by design. It was completely different than what I had seen across private equity and family
office style investing, and that’s still true today in the environment that we all have built out from the
associates all the way up to Clay and Jason.
Heath Hunter (02:23):
At Broadview, we have the ability to make investments that have a longer term payoff than three or four
or five years. We have the ability to address issues in a more thoughtful, methodical way than potentially
our private equity peers would because just from a perspective of time, we typically get into situations
where we see at least seven to 10 years of things to do and the ability to partner with the business. You
don’t have that in private equity. You have three to four years to really make a big impact, which comes
with some potential side effects.
Davis Malone (03:04):
We believe that we bring similar tools that a private equity firm would bring in terms of legal and
financial sophistication, sourcing and integrating m&a, capital, you name it. Those types of things. We bring those to the table. We view them moreso as a table stakes way to grow a business. Where we
believe we differentiate is from a strategy and talent development standpoint. When developing strategy
with a business, we work hand in hand with the team to make sure that we’re developing the right long-
term strategy and prioritizing the steps it takes to get there, to make it as seamless as possible, to get from
point A to point B on talent development. That’s more of a longer term type of strategy. We know it takes
a lot of time. It’s really hard to quantify the true impact, but it does impact the business over the long-term
to create a sustainable business going forward.
Clay Hunter (03:56):
We’ve not promised anybody that we’re going to be just this in such that we have to fit an investment or a
structure into a box so we don’t have to fit into a particular box. What really gets us going is when it’s a
good business. We’re not sort of turnaround folks. It’s just not what we do. We want there to be a good
underlying business there, good market, good business. It’s good if it’s great. That’s probably not for us
right now. We want to help make it great. That’s what gets us going.
