WILK Welcomes Jolyne Caruso

Jolyne Caruso is a banker and entrepreneur building a business based on aligning the interests of banking teams and investors. This month, she tells WILK about the business model behind the Alberleen Group and how the interest of her investors in transactions with social or environmental impact is catalyzing a new pipeline for the firm.

Hi Jolyne, thanks for sharing your story with WILK. Tell me about your day job.

JC: I am the Founder and CEO of The Alberleen Group, an advisory and merchant banking firm serving family offices seeking direct investments and, middle market companies looking for financing to grow. Alberleen co-invests in deals originated by its banking teams and, works with family offices and other institutional investors that want to invest in quality, direct investments. The company has about 50 people including banking teams focused on real estate, renewable energy, healthcare, financial institutions and industrials. Initially, the firm started as an incubator for investment bankers but, I didn’t foresee the headwinds surfacing for the middle market banking business. So, I did what every good entrepreneur does and adjusted the model to invest in direct deals in sectors where we have expertise. We take minority positions and invest our own money alongside our investors. I like working in a community and supporting the success of our teams.  Alberleen doesn’t pay salaries to its bankers but rather supports the teams operationally and takes a top-line revenue share. With that model, the interests of the firm and the banking teams are fully aligned.

On an average day, I’m meeting with our teams and our family office investors, working on transactions or meeting with new families interested in what we’re doing. Every day is different and that is what I like about my job. 

WILK:  Alberleen’s primary investor is an Asian family. What do you think set you and the firm apart and compelled that family to make a bet on you and this business?  

JC: The patriarch of the family holds women in especially high regard and sees that women have skills that lend themselves to good long term decision making: integrity, compassion, thoughtfulness. He believes in the research which speaks to women’s aptitude for asset management and finance.

Over time, Alberleen has attracted investment from numerous family offices – some of them even co-locate their US offices with us. I think the firm stands out because of the intense diligence we do on the companies we invest in, the fact that we invest our own money in the deals and, because we maintain a clear focus on the exits. It is not the most commercially lucrative model – yet – but we’re the best at the care and feeding of the deals we invest in. In the end, I believe, the model will pay generous returns to our investors and ourselves.

WILK: You are seeing an increased interest from your investors for deals with financial returns and social impact. How are you responding to that demand?

JC: About 20% of our deals today are “impact” deals and I want to grow that number. We’re seeing tremendous interest – particularly from the millennial family members – in this pipeline. In fact, we had an intern at our office last summer whose family is an investor in Alberleen and she authored a paper about the trends and interest of millennials regarding impact investing. We have an exceptional banking team working in the renewable energy space, and we focus on deals in this sector. We’re currently working on an interesting waste to feed investment and are just closing an LED lighting company investment. We are generally looking for deals sized between $5 to $25 million in sectors where we have expertise. Impact investing really speaks to my personal passions and the plan is to expand our impact business by recruiting an experienced thought leader in the sector.

WILK: Who or what institution taught you what you needed to know to be successful in your work?

JC: Often I hear women talk about the influence strong women mentors had on their career. For me, two men, Clayton Rose, who I worked for at JP Morgan and is now President of Bowdoin College and Mitch Jennings, my first boss at Bear Stearns supported me at an early age and taught me how to manage and build deep client relationships. I was 37 and pregnant when I was running JP Morgan’s Equities-Americas division – my management team consisted of six men and six women and it seemed that someone on that team was always just about to give birth or had a newborn. It was unheard of to have a young woman run such a large division at a major Wall Street firm. It was only possible because of Clayton and my husband, Shawn Fitzgerald, who believed in me and supported me 100%.

Shawn and I met when we were students at Columbia and Barnard – he is really the person who made my career possible. He left his legal practice when I was at JP Morgan to raise our children. That choice allowed me to accelerate at work without short-changing our children. It hasn’t always been easy but we wouldn’t do it differently. His relationship with our children, and particularly with our daughter, is very special and unbelievably close.

WILK: Do you have a “golden rule” of business that you’ll never break?

JC: I will never compromise a client’s trust in me and my professionalism for profit.  Alberleen has not yet been highly profitable but, we were an early entrant in the direct investing wave and the seeds we have sown and will ultimately make us very financially successful. My investors believe in my approach. I could have made a lot more money if I was less rigorous about the deals we invest in and pushed transactions to do more volume. My investment team probably looks at 200 deals a year and we might do 4 or 5. 

WILK: In addition to running Alberleen, you are also the Chair of Barnard College - your alma mater. How did that experience grow you as a leader and in turn, how do you support and develop women who work for you?

JC: I’ve had a chance to fund women entrepreneurs as an investor in the Golden Seeds Fund which provides a high quality, “farm league” for investors new to venture capital. Golden Seeds provides capital to women led firms that have a scalable business model and addressable market of at least $500 million. The firm was a pioneer among angel groups funding women and has helped dozens of successful women entrepreneurs secure critical funding, a more difficult challenge for women than for men.

Attending Barnard College was extremely influential in my life and I’m glad to give my time and expertise back to the school.  When Columbia, Barnard’s “brother” school, went co-ed in 1983 many people said Barnard wouldn’t survive. I’m proud that today, Barnard is the most selective women’s college in the world and continues to provide, as it did for me, an environment where women are encouraged to be brave and where being wrong is just an accepted part of learning. When you look at the low representation of women in tech and the dismal number of women on Boards and in C-suites, we’ve got a lot more work to do to prepare women for leadership in diverse and historically male dominated fields. I hope there is a resurgence of interest in women’s colleges as part of the solution.

WILK: Finally, is there something you still want or need to learn?

JC: I don’t have a quiet mind and getting quality sleep is an issue for me. When you’re growing a business, and have made promises to investors and employees there is a lot to worry about. So, I’m working on learning techniques to meditate and relax so I can do a better job taking care of myself.