George Jagodzinski (00:00):

My guest today has built a career in the messy high stakes reality of private equity and distressed assets. He's a veteran of GE, who like Magellan, went out and successfully navigated some of the toughest turnarounds in private equity history. I'm joined by Curt Miller, a senior operating partner at Littlejohn & Co and a veteran of Cerberus Capital Management. Curt is classically trained GE, taking those Jack Welch principles and applying them to the chaotic front lines of multi-billion dollar private equity deals.

(00:28):

Today, we break down why you can't just cost cut your way to prosperity, how to make procurement a strategic lever to an organization, and the secret to making a fortune by simply making a bad company slightly less bad. If you want to see how the pros actually move the needle, this is it. Please welcome, Curt Miller.

(00:45):

Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no-BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward, rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski. Curt, thanks so much for being here.

Curt MIller (01:24):

Pleasure, George. Appreciate you taking the time.

George Jagodzinski (01:26):

I'm excited to hear more about your story. I figured where we'd start is you came out of GE, it's famous for the amount of talent that's come out of there. And then like Magellan, you've navigated through just a bunch of different private equity firms of different flavors. And so maybe we just start with, what was that transition like from inside GE to then out into the private equity world?

Curt MIller (01:47):

What I like to say is I was classically trained GE, where I joined right out of college with an industrial engineering degree and went through what I'd say, all their indoctrination programs, for lack of a better word. Meaning, I started up in Erie, building locomotives on a two-year manufacturing track with the intent that I was going to be working in the factories for the majority of my career. As it turns out, that didn't happen.

(02:15):

From there in those first two years, I learned about the internal GE audit staff, which was effectively under the Jack Welch era, 50% of the CEOs and CFOs were graduates of that program. You had to stick it out for four or five years, typically five years if you wanted to be a CFO. I didn't want to be a CFO. And so I did four years on the audit staff.

(02:42):

Once I graduated per se off that program, I went to Jack Welch's last acquisition in Kansas City, GE Signaling. It was called Harmon Industry. They were doing railroad signaling equipment. And that's where right or wrong or indifferent, I got placed as the ... It was PSI leader, production, scheduling and inventory. And then right, wrong or indifferent, a restructuring CFO came in and replaced or eliminated the hint of procurement and gave me the job and said, "Good luck. If you don't figure it out in the first six months, we're going to find someone else that does."

George Jagodzinski (03:20):

Go save me some money, Curt.

Curt MIller (03:22):

Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It ended up sticking. The shoe fit per se in terms of finding my niche in life at that time as it turned out. We ended up taking ... It was a smaller business. I want to say we were around 400 million of revenue and we were at no EBITDA. And in 12 months, we had taken out ... It was headcount and material cost reductions. We hit in the P&L. I think it was 25 million bucks, was in the P&L. That wasn't run rate.

George Jagodzinski (03:53):

That's better than zero.

Curt MIller (03:55):

Yeah. It was an indoctrination in restructuring is what I would call it that I learned during that period. And during that period, Cerberus Capital started calling. I didn't know anything about private equity at that time. I was oblivious. I knew what it was, I'd say at a very cursory level. Meaning I knew, "Oh, you guys buy companies." And that was the extent of what I knew.

George Jagodzinski (04:23):

So spreadsheet guys that buy companies, that's about it.

Curt MIller (04:26):

Yeah. I was learning the ropes at that time of my life, but that ended up being valuable enough experience that when I did get into private equity, I could speak some of the language. It wasn't completely foreign to me what they were actuall