Dr. John Rutledge is chief investment strategist of Safanad, a global principal investment house, and a member of its investment committee, directing investments in private equity, real estate, and marketable securities. Dr. Rutledge wrote the Business Strategy column for Forbes magazine for more than a decade and was a regular cast member of Forbes on Fox for many years. He is a senior research fellow and clinical full professor at Claremont Graduate University where he teaches complexity economics and finance and chairs dissertations. He is a member of the board of directors of several privately owned companies including Global School Management, Pansophic, Early Learning Academies, and Element Critical data centers. Dr. Rutledge has had a long career in private equity investing and served on many boards of directors. He is the founder of Rutledge Capital, a private equity investment firm focused on US middle market companies, where he led more than 30 leveraged buyouts.
Dr. John Rutledge is a private equity guy and a real estate guy and has have been investing in private equity (PE) and real estate (RE), both as a general partner and, in select cases, a limited partner, for more than 40 years. Alternative Assets are not a thing. It is a term someone made up to describe the “other” things you can own besides stocks, bonds, and money market funds. A better description would be either “private markets” or "illiquid investments”. When you invest in private markets, you are on your own. You leave behind the luxury of publicly available information and the stamp of approval from the SEC or a trustworthy auditor. In this talk, he will review the strategies that the great PE and RE investors have used to find, acquire, build, and grow world-class companies. And he will talk about how you can use these ideas yourself to do the same work with the small and mid-sized companies in your own local market.