Buyouts asks Bill Barnum five questions on private equity, industry trends and social media Bill Barnum, managing partner at Brentwood Associates, was featured in the “Five Questions With” column of Buyouts on June 6th, 2011. Barnum answered questions on the current status of consumer private-equity funding and the size of the companies Brentwood pursues. He also addressed how Brentwood Associates’ portfolio companies use social media and whether or not Facebook and Twitter relate to their bottom line. Below are some of the highlights from Barnum’s answers.
- [Consumer private equity] may have been more volatile during the downturn, but now it seems to be recovering quite strongly.
- The size of companies we usually go after have $55 million to $25 million in Ebitda, so at that size, they’re not likely to be universal things like Starbucks, but they could be.
- We don’t have any secret formula for how to monetize [social media]. It’s something that everyone is working on. No one is quite sure how it will translate into revenue. It might become as much about social marketing as it’s social media.