Synergist Senior Sound Bites - November 2021:

Suzanne Passalacqua 

Senior VP of Portfolio Operations and Chief Compliance Officer, Carrick Capital Partners 

B.S. Economics, UC Davis; JD, University of San Francisco

Please tell us about your background and path towards your current role:

My own path was winding.  I loved stories my grandfather told me about accepting chickens as payment for his legal representation during the Great Depression, and how he helped individuals with various problems they had in their small town.  I knew I loved how nuances, and subtleties can sometimes be pivotal to making the right decision. But during law school, I was captivated by the energy around venture investing that you couldn't help but bump into within the Bay Area.  Bright-eyed and earnest, I followed John Doerr's words and actions like a peel on a banana. Instead of practicing law after I was admitted to the Bar, I took a turn - I decided to try something I loved while I was still agile enough to fail and go back to something I liked.  I got a break with a team starting up the San Francisco health care group for DLJ where I learned excellent mechanics, skills, and my way around the finance ecosystem, but knew I wanted to get deeper in the trenches and left to join a big company (McKesson Corp). Here, I had the opportunity to see how decisions were made and work alongside high-profile strategic consultants and the C-suite team.  When the executive team there changed, I started working independently alongside CEOs and management teams to help them think through their capital strategy and prepare for a capital raise or sale, most of the time staying involved as a consultant through any transaction.  Along the way, I found opportunities to acquire companies using a lot of structure and without much equity - which created a “sink-or-swim” environment; I had to learn the inner workings of companies we took over often with upside down balance sheets or a suffering P&L, create a workout strategy, and execute it.  This range of experiences lent itself well to my current role focused on optimizing cash, since cash is the result of every choice a company makes.

Which aspects of your current role do you enjoy the most? 

I love three things the most.  (1) On the objective side: working through the chaos of a complex problem to distill it down to the essential questions and finding the elemental data with which to guide the answer.  (2) On the subjective side: understanding the often-unspoken driving interests held by various parties and working with the objective data to arrive at an optimal outcome.  ("Optimal", yes, is also subjective).  I like both, more, when there is a high level of engagement with my team where we are working intensely towards a solution.  I like thinking out loud, since being wrong is a necessary step in the collective pursuit of right, the challenge of one-more-consideration, until we feel like we've combed the universe of possibilities and can make a decision that optimally satisfies all of the conditions.  (3) On the results side: I get immense satisfaction helping leadership teams (who are often founders as well) accomplish gratifying success after such a long and often grueling emotional, financial, and all-encompassing personal investment in their vision, their product, and their team.

How did you decide to pursue a career in investing? How did you work towards a focus on portfolio operations?  

Investing and an operational focus found me.  I gravitated towards what I liked and what I was curious to know.  I often became a confidante for CEOs who are in the precarious position of managing up to their board and down to their team; there are scenarios in which equivocation, unknowing, and trepidation need to be digested and transformed into a plan for approval and action so as not to be perceived as weakness or lose the confidence of either constituent.  This gave me good insights into the thought processes and underbellies of the problems presented, which now provide me a wide set of considerations when thinking through portfolio operations questions. 

Because of my relationship with executive teams, I often got involved in helping them think through both the small daily and bigger strategic challenges on their mind.  In the bigger companies, this might be a tuck-in acquisition and integration plan, or sale and exit; for start-up companies, this might be which vendors to push to make payroll, and keep the operations running smoothly.  In the workout situations, it might be managing sparse working capital and creating a branched logic for if/thens depending on which event was triggered first.  With the range of company maturity (workout to start-up to Fortune 50), I had the benefit of experiencing a range of responses depending on the needs: from scrappy to institutional-levers solutions. A wide range of situations and experiences offers more reference points to draw upon when presented with the situations that arise in my current role. 

What skills do you believe are determinants of success in this field? 

Depends which success you mean.  Success in job status; financial abundance; personal authenticity - those aren't always the same things all at once on any given day.  While everyone has to balance all of the goals we choose to make, as women, we are often well-versed in our competing interests and the trade-offs that come with making choices among them.  Understanding yourself enough to know what your motivating values are, what will make you feel fulfilled and at peace so you can give what you can generously and without regret, and finding a role and environment that align with those values – this all creates fewer sacrifices in the choice and grants more ease and joy in the pursuit. Of course: a hard work ethic, diligence, humility, integrity, and curiosity - in my opinion - are all necessary ingredients for any variant of success.

What advice might you share with women in the early stages of their investing careers? 

Follow your heart's desire to satisfy your own curiosities. If you're doing something you love, success of all types is more likely to follow.  

Never forget how infinitesimally small we are navigating this life in a quantum universe we know little about.  Whatever we think we know is in reality like the volume of a pea-hole in a tundra.  Life is not bytes and a series of algorithms, and we can't chart out the exact right path to yield one result, so trust your sense and weigh it appropriately alongside other factors.

There is no protocol for success. Leaning in is sometimes a good move, but not always; sometimes allowing is more advantageous.  Our media is successful at measuring a wide variety of items – namely, what's better, what's worse, who’s winning and who’s voted off the island.  Starting with our sameness, not our differences, and finding resolution instead of disparity gets us further.  

Power and strength come from knowing, virtue, and generosity; not from bravado, one-upsmanship or petty gains.  This doesn't mean give yourself away - it means know what you can give versus what to keep, and guard firmly. Most times, what someone says tells you more about them than it does about you.  

Be honest to yourself about yourself but only own what is yours to be accountable for. Life is long - what you do is not as important as how you do it.  The fiercest warriors are all heart-led people; the heart knows no fear.  

Other than those small things :), check your work again, ask lots of questions, and make sure you like it. 

Popcorn style: favorite book, restaurant in San Francisco, and activity? 

• Book: For a long time, The Snow Leopard (Peter Matthiessen)
• Restaurant in San Francisco: Right now, I can't get enough of Cotogna
• Activity: Always, I love most riding my horse when he relaxes enough to stretch his back up to meet me

Thank you for your time, Suzanne! To learn more about Carrick Capital Partners check out www.carrickcapitalpartners.com