Guy Hands on deal making and private equity
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Guy Hands, the founder of Terra Firma, opens up on the highs and lows and risks involved in deal making and private equity. From being bullied at school to becoming a household name, buying and selling businesses from cinema chains and pubs to waste management, aircraft leasing and green energy companies. We hear his side of the deal that turned sour, the acquisition of multinational music company EMI in 2007, and how his addiction to doing deals has affected his personal life. Ed Butler is in conversation with Guy Hands about his new book, The Dealmaker. (Image: Guy Hands; image credit: John De Garis)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, one of the most influential figures in modern British finance talks about his career and his regrets. |
| 0:14.1 | Have I achieved anything I'd want to put on my gravestone? And the answer is the only thing I'd want to put on my gravestone was something I did in the charity area with regard to my old college at Oxford, everything else. I did a good job |
| 0:26.6 | or a bad job, depending on which way you want to look at it. But actually, it's not what I wanted |
| 0:30.9 | to set out to do. Private equity pioneer Guy Hans with some unusual insights into wealth, health and happiness here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:44.0 | To journalists and friends alike, Guy Hans is a city financier who is more mythologised than most. |
| 0:52.3 | I've seen him in very, very challenging situations where he just simply does not stop. |
| 0:56.6 | I call him the phoenix because he keeps rising from the ashes. |
| 0:59.7 | He always wanted to break away from what all the pinstripe suits were doing in the banks |
| 1:05.1 | and do something more charged and more interesting. |
| 1:08.0 | An English financier and investor Guy Hans is the founder and chairman of TerraFerma Capital Partners. |
| 1:15.4 | It's one of the largest private equity firms in Europe. |
| 1:18.1 | He was a severely dyslexic child who went on to become a serial entrepreneur, |
| 1:23.2 | clinching deals from cinema chains to waste management to green energy, |
| 1:29.7 | making and losing billions along the way. |
| 1:34.4 | And he's now written an unusually candid account of how it all happened. |
| 1:42.3 | The book's called The Deal Maker and it focuses on a multi-decade and often controversial career devoted to private equity. |
| 1:46.2 | That's borrowing against the income streams of the businesses that he's buying up. As a businessman, people view you as only really having one objective in life, |
| 1:54.1 | which is to make money. And in reality, businessmen are just as complex as the rest of the |
| 2:00.1 | community and have just as many different things that |
| 2:02.9 | they're focused on. My career goes back quite a long way because I started off as a trader |
| 2:07.4 | in the financial markets at Goldman Sachs before moving into effectively private equity. |
| 2:14.3 | Private equity is buying businesses on a leverage basis so instead of buying a house with a mortgage |
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