E42: Private Equity & Life Lessons with Brent Belzberg

Foreign.

This podcast is brought to you by Gensler Wealth. The information discussed today is meant to be general in nature and not tailored to specific investing circumstances. This means that you should talk to your regular Gensler wealth advisor or your own advisor before acting on any information we discuss today. Nothing in this podcast is intended to be a solicitation and past performance does not guarantee future returns. Today we will get life and business lessons from one of the greats. So you better get your notebooks out. Today on the Unlimited podcast, very special guest, Brent Belsberg, the founder and senior managing partner of TorQuest. We're going to learn about private equity, but more importantly, we're going to discuss leadership, culture and the foundation for success in business and life. Let's go.

Foreign.

Welcome everyone to the Unlimited podcast. This for me is a very, very special episode. I have with us Brent Belsberg, founder and Senior managing partner of TorQuest. Before I give you his formal bio, why it's very special to me is that Brent has been a great supporter and friend of mine for many, many years. I always say to him, I don't know why he's so nice to me, but he is so nice to me and has been a real motivator for me even to launch Gensler Wealth. Probably wouldn't have happened without his support and his encouragement. So, Brent, I'll give you a formal intro, but thank you for everything so far and thanks for joining.

Brian, you're an amazing guy.

Thanks so much. Okay, so for our listeners, let me tell you a little bit about Brent. As I said, the founder and senior managing partner of TorQuest, which is a private equity firm, and we'll ask Brent to explain what that is. For those who may not know, he formed TorQuest in 2002 following the 2001 sale of Harrowston Inc. Which was a publicly traded investment fund he founded in 1992 to invest in and build businesses outside Torque Crest. Brent serves as a Director of Sinai Health System, having previously acted as Chair. He is a member of the Investment Advisory Committee of the University of Toronto. Brent's previous outside directorships include CIBC, ONY, REIT and Four Seasons Hotels. In 2018, Brent was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada for his work as a business leader and philanthropist, and Brent received Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2023 for his significant contribution to Canada and the Province of Alberta. He has a BCom with Honours from Queen's University and a JD from the University of Toronto, and in 2023 received an honorary Doctorate of Laws from Queen's University. So I hope that gives a sense to our listeners. We've got, as they say in Yiddish, a big macher here. And again, thanks. Thanks again, Brent, for being here.

I won't make you call me doctor. Right.

Okay, Dr. Belsberg. You know, when I thought about this podcast there, I typically do like a. A101, private equity 101 or, or whatever the subject is. But I think given your experience and everything you've done, I want to probably focus most of this what I would call sort of lessons from leaders or lessons from legends. But maybe to give listeners context, can you just give a little bit of detail about what is private equity, what's torquest, what have you been doing for the last 30 years? And then we'll talk a little bit about that, but then we'll dive into some more specific questions on life.

Sure. So, you know, it used to be that if you were an investment banker, you spent most of your time on public companies and public entities. And Henry Kravis, 40 years ago, 45 years ago, started a business where you use leverage to be able to buy businesses in the private world, either public companies that you take private, or transition from entrepreneurs or transition from big companies through divisions, divisional sales. And that's how the private equity market started. He originally raised the money. It was a very small business in Canada at the same time that Jerry Schwartz and Ken Rotman's dad started to do it in Canada in a public vehicle. I started and created a small vehicle called Harrison. It was too small, and all of us found that they were too small. So what Jerry Schwartz did was he raised private vehicles into his public company. That's what Ken Rotman did as well when he took over from Joe Rotman. And what I did was I sold the public vehicle to TD bank, which became Birchill, then went off on its own. And then I raised the first Torque west fund, which was only $180 million. And that's how I got started.

Repairs and maybe just a little bit of a deeper dive. So you raise $180 million, and then you're going to find some company to buy, companies to buy and then do what with.

Historically, when Henry New Kravitz did it, he would say that these public companies were fat. And what he could do was buy them, take costs out, put lots of leverage on them, take a bunch of expenses out. More like what you hear from the hostile takeover bid guys today or the hedge funds you see in today's market, and that business has morphed into one where you have to pay prices that reflect growth of the businesses. So more of the attention is spent on buying the business and then adding new opportunities for that business in an attempt to build it into a bigger and better business. At which point most private equity funds sell them, usually after holding them five to 10 years. And so we're sort of in the latter category. And if you're looking at our business and how we distinguish ourselves from other private equity businesses, we tend to do more entrepreneurial transitions than we spend buying divisions or buying public companies and taking them private. Our business is focused on 60 to 70 year old people, of which we think There are about 50,000 in Canada whose businesses we can either buy or buy an interest in or recapitalize in an attempt to try and get some more growth in those businesses. And the entrepreneur who started it did with his own money.

Okay, perfect. Makes sense. And so you mentioned way back when $180 million fund and you've done a good number of funds since then. It's been around for 22 plus years. So how's the firm evolved from that first fund till now? Funds, people, deals, however you would, whatever metrics you would use.

So the most recent fund is about $2.25 billion. It started with $180 million in the first fund, mainly raised from Canadian pension funds. Still, most of our money, if not 95% of our money, is raised from institutions, either foundations, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds. Only in our most recent fund did we start to take a little bit of high net worth money into it. The trend in the marketplace is more and more people like your clients have wanted to get into the private equity business. We've tended not to do that historically mainly because we've had so much demand from the institutional market that it's just easier for us to do that. We still had that demand in our most recent fund, having raised $2.25 billion in just a few short months. But for the next generation of people around torquest, I think high net worth individuals are going to become a much more significant part of the investor base than has historically been the case. And as a result, we opened the door a little bit to let those people in this time. I don't know if that helps explain it or not, Brian, but that's, that's sort of the implication.

Yeah, that's good. And then from a deal or industry or sector, you've explained sort of the, the strategy of that, transitioning entrepreneurs. Is there a particular industry focus? Obviously I can look on Your website, I see a, a broad swath of things. I actually don't see much on the technology side, which I think may be a, a specific decision on your team's part. But what's the makeup look like and why one industry versus another.

So we don't do natural resource stuff. So you won't see any oil and gas, timber mining deals on there because they're not, they're not easy to put proper leverage on in order to get the kinds of returns we want. You won't see real estate deals or anything related to real estate because for the same reason the return expectations are lower when you have asset protection on them. So we tend not to do those as well. We don't do retail businesses because we're bad at it. And we did one once and didn't do well on it and then made a decision never to do it again. If you want to focus on Canada, you tend not to specialize. As soon as you do specialize, you need to build that expertise internationally. Canada is not big enough to be able to do funds of our size and specialize in a particular industry. As a result, our differentiator, and I think anybody in Canada would tell you this is our differentiator, is being able to do transitions from, from family owned businesses on. So our speech goes something like this. So we meet a lot of people who are in their 60s or 50s and their children are just starting to think about coming into their businesses. And sometimes they have one child in the business and not the two others or the three other or the one other. And so they know they're going to have estate problems when one child is in the business and the others aren't. Because that child is going to say why have I worked for the last 30 years and I don't own more of it than the other child who's a doctor or a lawyer, accountant and who's made a lot of money doing that. Probably the person in the business is being paid less than those other people. And so generally those people put all their money back into their businesses and don't live high lives. You know, generally industrial business owners are either in small towns or they, they are not big spenders because they started with nothing. And so they, they tend to, if they have an extra dollar, buy some more equipment and if they have an extra few dollars, increase their marketing budget or whatever. They tend not to do acquisitions. And that's something we're generally pretty good at. They tend not to have very high level outside executives because they've run their businesses themselves. We're good at finding the right people to go into those businesses at the right time. They tend not to have boards of directors. And so we can bring some outside resources to those things. And they tend not to use a lot of leverage in their businesses. So we try and convince them to sell us 50% of their business and take 80% of their money out of the businesses through leverage and our equity commitment and still be our partners until such point as we go on and sell this business in the future, at which place they'll make more out of the 50% that they left behind. Because our goal is to make three or four times the money we put in. And so we're very appealing to those kinds of people. It comes with a change in behavior because they have boards of directors that they're not used to having and because they have to talk to someone as a partner. And so our strength is to be great partners. And that's why we in our very nature, spend lots of time with people like Brian who have lots of clients who look like.

And you mentioned generally striving for three to four times your investment. I assume that's pretty typical across most private equity, not just your firm. But is that the ballpark and what's been the sort of results?

So that's the objective for sure. That's the objective when we do it. And it's achieved through a combination of building the businesses into a bigger business so they attract higher multiples on the sale by taking a lot of leverage in the business, which the entrepreneur's generally not used to doing. And it was easier when interest rates were lower, for sure. And when there were fewer people that meet in the business at that time, it was easier as well. So getting those kinds of returns are harder today than they have been historically. And the spread from debt markets to equity markets is not as big as it used to be. Where get 25% on your. On your equity investment and you'd get 3% on your debt investment spread was large. Now it might be something less than 25%. And, and your interest rate spread might be 11 or 12. So the numbers are. Are smaller, which account for the risk that you take in this business because you're putting leverage in and you're actually having to manage these business as opposed to just taking a debt insurance.

Okay, and so you've been in the private equity business for a long time. What do you see as you look forward to the future of private equity? What's going to be a determinant of Success. What new approach is going to come up if any. Any thoughts as to what the future looks like for the team? That'll be at torquest when you've decided to, you know, not be there.

So the business has become a lot more sophisticated than when we first started and there are a lot of more ways to make money in the private market than there used to be. So there used to be guys who would do straight equity like me, and then there were banks who would do straight debt and there was really no one in between. And over the last few years there have been all kinds of debt funds that have been created where you can, as a high net worth investor, actually participate in the debt markets through these variety of debt funds that are created which really compete with banks and add a little bit of risk, some conversion rights, other things onto them to try and get a little bit higher returns. There's been a plethora of those and that's very different than what existed when I first started. And people like them and they invest them and they've generally done quite a few, quite well. In addition, over the last few years there's been a secondary market developed because it used to be that if you invested in a private equity fund, you had no liquidity at all. So you would see a J curve over the first couple of years, your deals would be burdened by the costs of running a private equity fund. And only in the later years would you get great returns. And so now there's all kinds of vehicles that are being created to try and make a market. Either when the general partner people like me want to sell a deal and they can do a continuation fund of it, or when the institutions who bought it decide they want to loosen their exposure to private equity, they can sell it in the secondary market. And that applies to individuals as well. It's a whole new business that has been created that didn't exist in prior years. In fact, there's even a business called a staking business where people are buying stakes in wealth managers and they've extended that into buying investments in private equity funds. And large private equity funds are looking at buying smaller private equity funds right now. So there's a whole bunch of new businesses that are being created off the back of what originally was a fairly simple either you, you put your money in the bank and they loaned their money out to people, or you gave your money to private equity funds and they were due straight according.

So does that mean if there's all these derivations, other ways of extracting your capital Maybe back or, sorry, extending capital through continuation funds, maybe getting your capital back sooner. If you come into a secondary fund, you know, five years in, does that actually lead to potentially more willingness to invest in a fund like yours early days? Because now there's a whole bunch of options to get access to those funds down the road, I guess. Is it good for you or bad for you, all these different opportunities?

Well, you could argue it both ways. Having more sources of capital makes it good for people who know how to do these businesses and can access additional sources of capital. That's a good thing. The bad thing is that it tends to create a whole bunch of vehicles for people who are less experienced than us. And as a result, you get competition from people who are less experienced. You saw it in the real estate business where there were great real estate developers and then there were a whole bunch of REITs who participated because they were better fundraisers. And after that, there were syndicated deals which created more competition because they were better fundraisers, not necessarily better managers of your capital. And so groups like Blackstone have dozens and dozens of different funds. They used to access only sovereign wealth funds and then moved to other kind of funds. And now they're using the retail markets. And the likes of JP Morgan and Goldman are creating products for individual investors, sometimes that have some liquidity issues and sometimes that don't. And so it's important as a private investor to understand what you're buying, if you're doing it, because you don't just buy the instrument that that is offered to you, but you buy with the best managers who have the best track record for the longest period of time. As soon as you start to see a whole bunch of new guys starting in the business without those track records or whose track records were earned at another firm, it's probably a mistake for the individual investor to address.

Good advice. Appreciate that. Last question, and then we're going to go into maybe some. Some more interesting things to discuss. Not that this isn't interesting, of course, because of where you sit. You're interacting with tons of companies across different industries. Some that you own, some that you're looking to own, some you're looking to sell, some that you're passing on because they don't meet your criteria. But regardless, these are private businesses that are sort of probably the backbone of the economy. And, you know, everyone wants to know what's going on in the economy these days. I can't imagine a better vantage point than yours. What are you seeing on the state of your businesses, the economy, what does it look like for the next whatever, 6 to 12 to 24 months? Any insights from your seat for our listeners?

Yeah, a little bit. During COVID there was an influx of capital into people's hands, way more than they thought they ever did. And so they bought a lot of things, and that's what caused inflation at the levels that you're seeing them today. And so when you're looking to buy a business which is just a year or two off of past Covid, the sellers of those business are representing that what happened during COVID will continue to happen going forward. The hardest part for us right now is to cut the wheat from the chaff effectively and try and figure out how much was just Covid influence on the business and how much is real. And even in some of our businesses, we're fearing some of that. And so we sold seven or eight businesses during COVID just because we thought they were doing way better than they would do in a normal environment. I think people are seeing that generally. And what you're starting to see as inflation comes down is that, you know, the businesses are struggling a lot more than they did over the last little while. You don't get that feeling by looking at the stock market, but the difficulty is that that's really isolated to five or six great companies that have done amazingly well. And if you get beneath that, you'll see the effect on earnings, which is resulting in increased cost cutting in those businesses, increased unemployment levels in the economy and bringing inflation back to normal. So I would say what you hear from economists, you generally see in the businesses that we're looking at or that we own. People bought online furniture to a point that we never had to have a sales organization. All we had to have was more production facilities because we could sell whatever we did to a place where we actually have to create new products and have to sell new products because there isn't that same demand for them. And where there is the same demand, Asian companies are dumping them into Canada. And as a result, there's an increase in competition as well.

I appreciate that insight. I want to change gears a little bit. We talked about private equity and your business and what you do. I want to be able to share some of your insight with our listeners. So maybe we can rewind a little and go back to the beginning, which is sort of how did you even get into this world to begin with? What was the beginning even before Harrison? Why were you interested in finance in this world with did someone influence you? I've already made it clear you're one of my mentors. Maybe you had a mentor or two. What was the journey to get to where you are today?

So I had a. I had a very weird resume, Brian. I went to Queens Undergraduate business. I went to U of T Law School. I was an okay student and did well. I went to work for Tories and then I went to work for my family. And my family was an aggressive buyer of businesses and got into some serious trouble. So when I was in my mid-30s, I was left there to restructure a family company that had run into some significant problem. And so when I finished that, and I was just in my early 40s, very early 40s, I wasn't sure that with that resume I could get the kind of job that I really wanted to do, having restructured multi. Billions of dollars of debt all by myself at a very early age in my life.

So what kind of business was that?

They did real estate, they had financial institutions and they did aggressive buying of businesses very similar to what Ivan Boesky, Mike Milliken, all the peoples you, you read about in Predators Ball.

Right.

I went looking for a job because I had nothing when I was 40 years old, literally nothing. And so every job that I could get wasn't very appealing after you had managed by yourself with just a team to restructure that kind of debt and be that involved in trying to fix up that kind of business beneath you. And so I thought that I should try and raise some money and build my own business. Hard to imagine that anyone would give me money at that point because I had no track record of being able to do it, to speak of. But because I'd done such a good job of getting lenders back their money, some of those lenders decided that they would start me up as in a little public vehicle, as a. As a private equity fund. And then I learned it on the job. But by the time I was about 48 years old, it was pretty obvious that running a private equity fund in a public vehicle, which was small, a few hundred million dollars of value, was never going to be recognized by the market appropriately. And so after a bit of a hostile environment for that, I decided to sell it to TD bank and, and go the traditional route of raising money. Ontario Teachers Pension Fund gave me the first $50 million to get started. And that's how I got started in the business. It was really just me in a room. I had $183 million in my first fund and I didn't really know how I was going to run It. So I went to look for a guy who, who could help me as and had more operating experience than I did in the kinds of businesses that we were buying. And that's how I got my partner, Eric Burke. And together we built the team and the organization that we have here. And when it's time to exit, I guess we'll exit together too, because we're very close friends. And any ads a form of operating experience that even though I might have some of, I value his input substantially.

Through and any, any major steps along the way from a strategic perspective that you think you look back, you go, oh, lucky we did these four things over the last 20 years, because those were really worked out, helped us work out well. Any, any big strategic, positive things.

Well, you need a differentiator because every business gets commoditized, right? And if it, if it gets too commoditized and you have no differentiator, you just look like everybody else. And young people come up and they'll be more efficient than you. And that's what happens in every business. It doesn't matter if you're an auto parts manufacturer, retail store, or anything else. So you always have to keep that little bit of an edge that makes you different than everybody else. And just like great brands, our focus has always been on doing things a little bit better, giving a little bit better customer service effectively. Which means that when we walk in to see an entrepreneur, they tend to know who we are, and they tend to be able to ask the last 50 people you did transactions with how you did, and if the answer is 50 out of 50 that you treated people with respect and integrity, then you have a chance of doing the 51st. And if the answer is the 20 under the last 50 you did with respect and integrity, then you tend not to get the 51st deal. And so that's been our differentiator forever. And even when we had pretty rough returns at the beginning of fund two, we were able to raise fund three, basically because people knew that if we gave them a handshake, they could take it as a handshake, and that if we treated them with that, we would treat them with respect and humility. And people tend to. Everyone tends to have the same models. People have a lot of the same deal flow, People tend to have a lot of the same bank relationships. They tend to be able to have access to the same management teams. And I think what's most important is that somebody knows that if, if they tell you something that that's the way it is and that that you're not using superlatives to say things about yourself that in fact aren't true.

Right. I have a feeling that this respect and integrity and treating people well might be a theme that we talk about a few more times here. Because that's certainly my experience with you personally. And whenever I mention your name or I said to someone last week that you know very well. Yeah, I'm going to interview Brent for the podcast. Universally, it's always nice things and it's harder to fall. Brian.

So I'm always shy when you say those things because none of us are perfect and none of us are geniuses and we just try our best and put one foot in front of the other every single day and try to not take an edge ever. What we teach people around here is that if you're negotiating with somebody and you think they miss something on the other side, you tell them.

Right.

And you don't try and take advantage. And so when people ask, why do you sell businesses? The answer is generally because the management team tells us it's the right time to sell it. And the answer is, why do you buy businesses? And it's generally because the management team there thinks that there are some things they can do with them. And so every time one of my, my competitor says, we, we, we, I always say all we do is, is find the right management teams and give them the right capital structures to enable them to do the things they do and back them again when they're ready to sell.

Right. So just probably on a similar theme, I was listening to a previous podcast that you did, and you said the following. You said people underestimate how important culture is and how important working together and experience is. This is sort of in the topic of leadership and running your firm, and maybe more than that. Can you elaborate on that and talk about your experience in managing? What I think now is maybe, I don't know, 50 some odd people at Torque west, give or take.

It's interesting. We've added 14 people over the last year and there's almost a lineup to be able to come work here, which is now. You've heard a brag. And I don't like to say those things that sort of antifa. What I normally say. And it's because people want to work here. Why do they want to work here? Because if somebody drops something, the other person picks it up and gives it to them. You know, our compensation plan is, is relatively flat. People tend not to get paid based on performance. They get promoted based on performance, but they tend not to get paid based on that. We don't think we have the ability to be able to judge them in a year or two on how they're doing. So we give people the ability to be able to prove themselves. We provide them capital, we provide them deal flow. We provide a working environment that fun and where they have lots of support and lots of help. But you never hear us say, that was my deal or that was his deal or that was somebody else's deal. If we have a failure, it's because it was a Torque west decision, and if we have a success, it was because it was a Torque west decision. And so that's the culture we've tried to create around here. It doesn't fit for everyone. And some people don't like it because they're not sure that they can rise above the others that quickly, but they ultimately do if they're successful and they just take everybody with them and there's enough to spread around that everybody's happy. We mentor the young people just the way we did with you when you were in an early stage. But we get to do it every day.

Right.

And so we're pretty lucky. I mean, the most fun thing for me is not the next deal, but young people around here who make decisions that are way better than I would have ever made. And me to watch them do that, it is fantastic. It's the most fun thing I have. And people say, how long are you going to keep doing this? I say, as long as they'll let me. And that's, that's. That's my goal.

Amazing. What's your policy around? Or is there a policy, you know, in this new world. Right. Folks in the office, are you mostly in, mostly out? Because I imagine to build the culture you're cultivating, there might be tough to do remotely.

That's exactly reflective of who we are. We've never, ever issued a letter saying you have to be here at this time or you have to be there at that time. The only thing we said to people is that, that this is a bit of a world where you have to learn from your peers. So it's way easier for you if you could be near them and, and do it together as opposed to do it alone from home. But you make the decision as to what works for you and what doesn't work for you. And you have a variety of different models for people. And I think that's why would be pretty good for people who are either single parents or the principal parent, because we know they have to do their rules different than people who don't have that obligation in their lives. We have a very high number of very young people around this organization because of the level we've grown at. And so they don't want to be in a 400 square foot apartment. They want to be here with their peers. And we provide lunch every day for everybody, really nice lunches. We provide health club memberships to every single person who's here. And, and so, you know, if they want to go in the middle of the day or late in the day, they can do that because they can eat lunch here at their desk and then go off afterwards. Or they can sit in our little dining room. Not really a dining room, just a, a table in the middle of the pit that they all sit and they talk to each other and, and we even had a little Nintendo game set up. A very tech oriented kind of thing. And people have contests and you know, everybody went bowling last week and we just do fun things around here. And you know, I think that that sort of adds to the culture that we have.

That sounds great. Maybe I'll come work for you here of maybe another part of the sort of culture and relationships. One thing that you mentioned, and I think it's amazing, you've had your partnership with Eric for 20 plus years. It sounds like I've been in rooms with both of you together, but I don't really know what goes on between both of you. But it seems to be a very, very wonderful partnership. And partnerships, you know, two people, they don't always work super well. I've seen great ones and not so great ones. What's the secret to a great business partnership? You know, when you own a business very closely with someone else.

So we have had a great partnership forever and he's an amazing guy. And I don't think our houses are back to back. Our wives are friends, we're friends, we hang out together socially a lot. We're really, really comfortable with each other and we're very different. And he loves the inside and I love the outside. And, and so, you know, it's been a great partnership for that reason as well. What's more interesting is that we have six people on our management committee. They're all partners, they all own the management company with us that's developed over the last five to 10 years. And we don't have any disagreements really amongst them either. And we don't really make any decisions that we all don't make. Maybe to an extreme at occasion, but everybody feels like they're part of it and they get to be part of it. So it's moved from Eric and I to six people making the decisions. And we have 10 partners now, six of which are equity partners, four of which are our partners in addition to that. And so we have, I think, six partner meetings a year. And we treat them with the same level of respect that we treat the six equity partners who treat Eric and I with the same level of respect. So, you know, it's in some ways it's more like a law firm or like that than it is, than it is a company.

Okay, gotcha. And then maybe last question, really on sort of the leadership side, I guess you have the unique vantage point. Again, as I alluded to before, it's not just your business, your owners owning and have owned many, many, many businesses over the years. What have you seen as sort of the best traits of some of the leaders of your portfolio companies that have proven to drive great success? And maybe on the flip side, any, any traits that ultimately prove to be not so wonderful?

Yeah, I would say, you know, we do so many partnerships with entrepreneurs, and I'm always amazed that even though we, we cash somebody out with $550 million of cash a year and a half ago, and that partner works harder now than he did before he had that kind of money in his pocket, you just see it over and over and over again that these people have a work ethic, they have a desire to do the right thing. You know, sometimes we, we even take them out for more. And, and, and you always read the write up from the young people around here that the old guy doesn't matter anymore, that he's put the right management team in place. When a person starts a business like that, they have a, a feel that nobody else has for that business. And if you can keep that feel around, we have very few companies where the vendors who don't have a little bit of an equity piece in it and don't continue to maintain the same level of interest they had when they owned 100%. And so that's what's made our business a little bit different and better than some. I think for that reason, what's bad is if we provide them a lot of capital and they lose any of the discipline they had when they were spending their own money alone. And we've seen that in a couple of businesses where all of a sudden they move from having $5 million of capital to spend a year to $150 million of capital to spend and they get a Little bit looser with it than they would have gone if it was all their money. I would say that's. That's the bat.

Okay, on the topic of entrepreneurs, obviously you're dealing with tons of entrepreneurs, and you're an entrepreneur. You're a founder of your business. Any advice for folks today, whether they're young or old or in whatever portion part of their career, if they want to start a business? What do you say?

Yeah, I mean, there's no. There's no excuse for not working hard, and there's no excuse for taking shortcuts. And the little things are what catch you up. You know, the fact that you missed something, the fact that you didn't read a document, those kinds of things. So the thing about entrepreneurs is they may not have been trained to be able to do that, but if they get sloppy and they get loose, then mistakes happen. And you're better to miss something than you are to do something too quickly and make a mistake. So, you know, once a week, we'll get a request to do an additional fund, a real estate fund, a debt fund, an equity fund, you know, wealth management funds, whatever. And we don't give our brand easily to anything else, so it takes us a very long time to be able to do that. And so you get caught up by the mistakes you make, not by the opportunities you create. And so my suggestion is, you know, any time you see someone get too big too fast, and that's what's happened, you ask why we don't do more tech stuff. If you get too big too fast, it probably doesn't have sustainability. And the thing that we're most proud of is, is the business is, you know, 20, 25 years old, and it's better today than it was 25 years ago. And that's probably the right path and the right tenure and the right. The right velocity to be able to grow in this business, and everyone who did grow too fast tends to get hurt.

And what about entrepreneurs? Not in your business, necessarily, but folks that want to start their own business. Like, what's the climate like today, in your view, for doing something like this? And what do you need to do to be successful if you're going to start your own business?

So I always hear from everyone, oh, I feel sorry for my children. It's so much tougher for them than it was for me. And I always say, that's wrong. It's way easier for them today. And you can see it in my two boys. There's tons of capital available, and they took none from me, either of them. None from me. And they built great businesses because of it. And I think they have an easier time than we do because capital availability is there for all people. And people after the tech world, people expect young people to take risks, and they're willing to back them to be able to do that. That wasn't the case when I started. There was almost nobody who would give a young person a chance to do something on their own, and they would put it together with chewing gum and bathing wire. And now they can get critical mass relatively easily and relatively quickly. And so I say it's not for everybody. You have to understand your own risk tolerance. If you reach a point where you have a big mortgage and then where your kids are in private schools or when you need to send them to summer camp, it's way higher to do what you did, Brian, and take a risk than it is when you're young and you have none of those obligations. So if you have the personality and you have the desire, you have less knowledge, for sure, and less experience, but you also have less to risk. And that's why you see in places like Israel, where they have less to risk than anywhere else, there's more and more entrepreneurs all the time, not because it's innate to the culture, but because they live in a world that taking risk is part of their. Their DNA. And so it's risky to go on your own. For sure it is. And you have a high chance of failure. For sure you do. You're never going to know if you don't try. And what the Americans have given us is an ability to fail and still come back and do it again. And so I had a really rough fun, too, and then people gave us a chance again, and now we've done really well. That's the world we live in today. And did we suffer? For sure we did. And was it hard? For sure it was hard. And did we think we'd never be able to do it again? For sure. And that's the truth. In almost every entrepreneur's business that you look at, it never goes straight up into the right. It always goes like this. And our job is to try and take that line through the middle and figure out where the right number is and not buy it off the high. And we'll never be able to buy it off the low unless it's in trouble. So it's trying to find that place around that line that makes it make sense for us to be able to buy it. If a business is too great, just Being too great for too long, we probably can't buy it. Probably price is too high and there's too many bidders for it. So we recognize the fact this is a hard thing to do, but it's so rewarding because you have a level of independence and you have an ability to be able to do things that other people don't do. And you can pat yourself on the back and say, I did it. People ask me, what was the greatest moment of your life? I always say, the first marathon I wrote and they ran. And they say, why that you have such a great family, built a great business, you do lots of stuff in the community. And I always answer because I did it alone. There was no coast there. Nobody else could take credit for it than me. And everything else I've done in my life. I have the most amazing wife or the most amazing kid, the most amazing partners around here. So zeroed a lot of the credit for it in that one. Really? Nobody else.

And any comments on the topic of the day, speaking of entrepreneurship and taking risks, the new changes to the capital gains, inclusion rates and a rate, I should say, and what the government's doing here, what does that mean for our entrepreneurs and our innovation and capital?

Well, it means there's some deals the next week or two for us, but those are not sustainable and we can't make decisions in a week or two anyway. So it doesn't make any difference. It's a mistake because Canada needs spending. It needs capital spending more than anything. And capital gains are made on dollars you've already paid a company on one spot. So it's really double taxation. If you add any level of estate tax to that, it's really triple taxation on the same thing. And once you start doing that to pay for social programs, what ends up happening is people invest less in this country and the last thing we need right now is for them to invest less in this country. It's just a basic lack of understanding of the economic environment that we live in. If that's the decisions you made. And it's harder and harder if our American friends do something different because. Because people have a choice and capital, they move easily. And so we all need an environment here where, you know, the amount of more than 50% of our. Of our capital is, is us, it's international institutions. And if you create an environment where they don't want to invest in this country, then you lose all that new capital that comes in here to invest. And that would be a mistake.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. Speaking of investing in the country or contributing to the country. Switching gears for a little bit. You've done a lot of work in the philanthropic area. You've been on boards of directors for other companies and other institutions. First of all, how do you balance the business and I would call it, you're giving back. And what's your approach around your philanthropic activities? What, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? What legacy are you trying to leave?

You know, I never think about legacy for sure. I just do what feels good to me. And, and you know, I. The government tries to, to spread income. I never mind that. I always want to help those who don't have it, as. As fortunate as. As I have had. And so I'm fully in favor of that. They just have to do it in a way that actually creates more wealth for everybody, doesn't take it away from other people. And for me, I get a lot more from the organizations that I join and the places that I work and the charitable organizations I do than they get from me. I hate injustice. So if I can find a way to participate, to try and stop injustice, then I'll get my hands dirty. You know, I sat on boards of directors, I chaired hospitals, I ran marathons, and I built my business. And I never thought I was busy. So every time someone says to me, I'm so busy, I just think it's an excuse for them to not do something. And I always have time for all of that. Hopefully my kids will tell you that I had time for them. At the same time, I hope I didn't sacrifice that for all of those things as well. And I hope I didn't sacrifice it in my marriage either. You know, everything is a balance in life. But, you know, they say if you want something done, give it to a busy person. I find it harder. I find it harder when I'm less busy. I find it easier to do more things when I'm busier.

Right. Well. And you know, I always appreciate the time you've spent with me. No matter what you say, I think you are a busy man. So. So thanks for that. So, the last maybe few questions. So what's the future look like here? What's the plan for the next 30 years of your life? And hopefully more for you, for TorQuest, what does it look like going forward?

I say to my partners at TorQuest, if we can start it with nothing, with no investors, no relationships, no deal flow, no organization, no people, no capital, Imagine what you can do with all of those things there today. So I think they'll create something great out of it. And, and I just want to be a little participant and I write to. To just have a. A view and maybe add some wisdom to it and, and not much else. My goal is to let the next generation of people build on what we've been able to build here and to basically give them the equity that we have in this place so that they can feel the same level of ownership that I felt while I did. That's the view of this business, is that it's not easy to pass on to your kids. It's much easier to be able to pass it on to the next generation of people who are working here. So that's my goal for them. My goal for myself is to stay involved as much as I can here and elsewhere to keep those brain cells going for as long as I can. I don't want to play golf, you know, I'm trying over the next little while to do as. As many things as I can that, that I may not be able to do in 10 years, like ski, hike, run, boat, whatever it has. It happens to be so that while I can do them, I'm going to do them. And that's sort of my objective in life. And on the charitable side, I see so much injustice, particularly right now, in the way the world is viewing things. I think there's so many people who have no sense of history. So it's my job, I think, over the next little while to make sure that. That history they do understand. And we've always been able to, in Canada, be a place which takes new immigrants in and allows them to thrive. My grandparents were that. Your grandparents were that. And if that stops, we're in big trouble here. And nobody thinks that prejudice or inequities will stop just with the people you see it with today. It'll extend to us as a society as a whole. And if we get to a place where. Where everyone's calling each other names and saying bad things to each other, then we're in a very bad place, and I don't want that.

Yeah, well, I'm speechless. I couldn't agree more with that. I got two more questions for you, but the last one, your final parting advice, single most important piece of advice for those striving for success in career and life, what would you say?

Learning is just, you know, it's humility and humility and confidence are not two different. You can't. You can have both. You can understand that there's so much to learn and there's so Much you don't know, and you have to keep striving for it. At the same time, you can have a little bit of pride for what you've been able to create and who you've been able to help along the way. And so if you can keep the balance of those two things, you'll be successful.

Okay, great. So the last question, then I let you go. The last question that we ask everybody. So I think, you know, our theme around here is unlimited your wealth, unlimited. We can help families with whatever they need. We're not limited, like maybe some other institutions out there. So I always ask my guests, now you've told us your whole history and founding your firm and everything you've done. But I always ask my guests, the world is unlimited. You could do anything you want. You don't have to be, you know, running TorQuest. Maybe you never even had to start TorQuest. If you could do anything in your life, unlimited options, what would you be doing?

You know, I think I've just been the luckiest guy in the whole world. I'd like to make this world a little better place for young people today. Not because they don't have the opportunities. As I said earlier, I think it's easier for them than it was for us and particularly for our grandparents who came over here. But our grandparents never felt they were victims. Our grandparents never felt anything was owed to them. They always believed that they weren't entitled to anything. And whatever they got, they got it through hard work. And I still feel that way about me, is that nobody owes me anything. It's my job to create the next opportunity for myself and I constantly look for it. And that doesn't mean money. That means doing things that make a difference. And that can be an industry. It can be in other things as well. And so my heroes are the guys who grew up in Listowell, Ontario and coached their kids hockey team and built a business that we write a check to them now for half a billion dollars. Those are my heroes. My heroes aren't aren't Bay street and they are Wall Street. Those are the people who are my heroes. And I hope we all get a chance to recognize those heroes.

All right, look, I guess I just wanted to say thanks and appreciate all your time and your candid answers. I think it was fantastic and really, really appreciate you taking the time as you always do.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much, Brent. Okay, we'll talk with you soon. Well, bye. Bye.

The Unlimited podcast is hosted and produced by Brian Ginsler and is edited and mixed by myself, David McMillan. This podcast is not to be taken as investment advice. If you like what you heard, don't forget to rate the podcast and follow us on social media at Gensler Wealth. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Well hey everyone, hope you enjoyed that podcast with Brent Belsberg. Wanted to do a little post credit detail of what's coming up here on the unlimited podcast. We have a really fun and special podcast coming up. In the next episode we are going to speak with a lady named Juveria Zaheer. If that name is familiar, it would be if you are a watcher of Jeopardy. Juveria won Canada's heart as a Jeopardy. Winner, making it all the way to the Tournament of Champions. And we're going to get the insight on how you get to Jeopardy, what it's like on Jeopardy, how do you prep and all about the whole experience. We are, me and my family are huge Jeopardy. Fans. I'm a huge Jeopardy. Fan and if you are, stay tuned for that episode. Coming next on the unlimited podcast.