Saif Mansour took Eric Beckman to lunch in February at Toscanova in the Westfield Century City mall. Mansour just wanted to congratulate his friend Beckman on his recent retirement from Century City private equity and debt giant Ares Management. But he ended up with a new partner.
Mansour is founder of Breakwater Investment Management, a Century City finance firm that focuses on lower- and middle-market debt. He told the Business Journal that Beckman has decided to join Breakwater full time as chairman and co-managing partner. Beckman will head the firm’s investment committee and lead its expansion into private equity.
Beckman, who called himself “a terrible failure at retirement,” was interested in what Mansour was doing and started hanging out around Breakwater’s office soon after that lunch. With more than 20 years of experience at Goldman Sachs and Ares, Breakwater’s young analysts and associates gave him the rock star treatment at first.
“It was really fun,” he said. “They were all very deferential. That’s not who I am as a guy, so I was a little embarrassed by that. I quashed that very quickly.”
At Ares, Beckman was the West Coast head of the firm’s direct-lending department, which made loans to much larger companies than the ones Breakwater caters to. And Beckman said he finds the change rejuvenating.
“When you’re dealing with smaller companies, they are still very entrepreneurial,” he said. “They are often still run by their founders and, as you know, founders bring this incredible energy and vision and excitement.”
Coincidentally, Beckman’s move to Breakwater brings him back to familiar territory: Century City’s SunAmerica Center at 1999 Avenue of the Stars, where the firm’s office is located.
“When I joined Ares, we shared offices with Apollo Global Management in this very building,” he said. “So I’m back in the SunAmerica after all these years.”
Beckman isn’t the only big name to recently join the Breakwater team. Last month, the firm added Deborah Benton, formerly president of downtown L.A. retailer Nasty Gal, as a partner. Before Nasty Gal, Benton was chief operating officer of ShoeDazzle, an online shoe subscription service in El Segundo.
Her first role with Breakwater will be as a strategic adviser to the board of Breakwater portfolio company Planet Blue, a Santa Monica clothing store chain.
“I am excited to support the development of Breakwater’s growth equity efforts in the lower middle-market, branded consumer and specialty retail sectors,” she said.
Westward Dough
Brentwood real estate development investment firm Regent Properties, which specializes in land deals and offices, just raised $300 million. And the firm’s president, Eric Fleiss, is ready to put it to work, focusing on secondary markets in cities west of Dallas. That’s where he sees both value and properties that are ripe to be repositioned.
“There’s this whole creative office space, open-cubicle trend,” Fleiss said. “We’re investing in markets that are a lot cheaper to do that.”
Fleiss said the fact that Regent develops properties itself is attractive to the institutions and high net-worth individuals who invested in this latest round. It gives them exposure to these assets without layers of investors in between.
“People are really interested in investing directly with a developer,” he said. “A lot of the institutions like the idea of getting close to the property.”
Woman Focused
The Tory Burch Foundation has partnered with Bank of America Corp. to start the Elizabeth Street Capital initiative, which launched in Los Angeles last month with an event at the InterContinental Los Angeles Hotel in Century City. Elizabeth Street intends to provide women entrepreneurs with affordable loans and networking opportunities to help their businesses bloom.
The Charlotte, N.C., banking giant seeded the program in January with a $10 million commitment. Loans are administered through local community development financial institutions that traditionally cater to underserved borrowers, such as the VEDC in Van Nuys, which is Elizabeth Street’s local partner.
Pacific Performance
Matthew Clark, an analyst at Birmingham, Ala., investment bank Sterne Agee, initiated coverage of several L.A.-area banks, including BBCN Bancorp, Hanmi Financial, Opus Bank and First Republic Bank. Clark also reinstated coverage of PacWest Bancorp, which Sterne Agee had suspended. He gave a “buy” rating to Hanmi, Opus and PacWest; a “neutral” rating to BBCN; and an “underperform” rating to First Republic.
Clark also assumed coverage of local banks City National Bank and Cathay General Bancorp. He gave both “neutral” ratings.
Staff reporter Matt Pressberg can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
