Views From the Market

Damian Peluso of KPMG joins Mario Nigro to discuss how financial due diligence has been affected by the pandemic. Some of the changes are practical, such as fewer face-to-face meetings and an inability to work on-site. Others are more substantive, as advisors develop new approaches to disentangle COVID-related issues from those that reflect longer-term strengths and weaknesses in the seller’s busi...

Our guest on this podcast is Jay Greyson of Tampa-based Supply Chain Equity Partners (SCEP), the only North American PE firm that invests exclusively in the supply chain/distribution sector. Jay discusses how pandemic-related disruptions, baby-boomer retirements and impending capital gains tax changes in the U.S. are bringing many companies to market. Canada is a significant part of SCEP’s portfol...

Shivalika Handa, a corporate finance advisor and leader of PwC Canada’s technology transactions group, joins Mario Nigro in this podcast. From a technology M&A perspective, the pandemic sharply accelerated a longer-term trend of international investor interest in Canada’s tech sector, including the country’s fintech, healthcare and AI clusters. Shivalika notes that this improved access to foreign...

In this episode, Mario Nigro speaks with CIBC’s Christian Davis about the trends he’s seeing in Canadian midmarket M&A. The remarkable sell-side strength of the pandemic era appears to be based on a combination of long-term and pandemic-specific factors. In Christian’s view, activity is likely to remain robust over the medium term, with rising inflation being one “red flag” that he and his team ar...

Sasha Cucuz joins us to discuss private equity in the real estate context. His company, Toronto-based Greybrook, makes private equity investments in residential real estate development projects in Southern Ontario and across North America. Greybrook is actively involved in managing the projects in collaboration with developers. Sasha provides his insight into the direction of the residential real...

Our guest in this podcast is Dr. Afsheen Afshar, founder of New York-based Pilot Wave Holdings. Focusing on smaller midmarket companies, Pilot Wave invests not only capital but also AI and other advanced technology expertise into its portfolio businesses. As an MD/PhD from Stanford University, Afsheen spent a number of years leading the data science divisions of top U.S. financial firms before mov...

In this podcast, Mario Nigro is joined by Rob Cherun, an Ottawa native and CEO of Stealth Monitoring, a success story of Canadian entrepreneurship. They discuss the company’s expansion from regional business to significant player in the U.S. and Canadian commercial video surveillance markets, as well as its future possibilities.

Mark MacPherson is co-founder and partner of Argyle Capital Partners Inc., a Toronto-based midmarket firm. In this podcast, he and Mario Nigro discuss Argyle’s approach of raising capital for each specific deal rather than creating a pool of committed capital and finding ways to deploy it, as well as the company’s response to the pandemic.

Glen Silvestri, co-founder and managing partner of Toronto-based Sage Capital Partners, joins us to discuss his company’s experiences as an investor in businesses at the lower end of the Canadian midmarket. While there are challenges to working in this neglected market niche, there are also many rewards.

Chip Chaikin, whose Ohio-based firm is about 20% invested in Canada, discusses the challenge of looking for deals and managing relations with portfolio companies across a closed border and refers to some of the differences in the pandemic response in Canada and the United States.

Alan Chettiar discusses the resilience he has seen, as an advisor to midmarket entrepreneurs, over the past year. The software sector has been strong throughout the period and most other sectors are now back on track, as buyers begin to price deals on a post-Covid basis.

Ross Thomas is involved in midmarket lending and discusses what he has been seeing in the Mississauga-Etobicoke (Toronto-area) market, which is home to many industrial and logistics companies, during the pandemic. Transition management and succession planning have continued to be busy.

Sean Flinn joins us to discuss how RWI is used in transactions involving PE firms and how Canada is following the lead of other countries in using it in a wider range of situations.