Raising Common Equity and Building an Investor-First Practice with Adam Steinberg

Adam Steinberg is a Principal at Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group, where he co-heads the equity business and chairs the equity approval committee. Since joining in 2004, Adam has focused exclusively on raising common equity for clients, closing transactions aggregating billions of dollars of capital across traditional and alternative asset classes.

Prior to Ackman-Ziff, Adam spent four years as a principal at Partners Group, investing on behalf of an opportunity fund. Before that, he helped build a capital markets group at AEW Capital Management and worked as a capital advisor at Boston Financial Group, which was later acquired by Lend Lease.

Adam began his real estate career as a financial analyst in the real estate group at Salomon Brothers during the early 1990s. He holds a degree from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Cornell University.

Insights from Adam Steinberg on Raising Common Equity 

When Ackman-Ziff's equity team evaluates a new assignment, the first question isn't whether the deal is good. It's whether they can win. Adam Steinberg and his partners treat time the way other firms treat capital. It's the scarce resource, and every deal that comes through the door gets measured against the probability of getting it done.

The process starts with investors. Before sourcing deals, Adam's team goes to equity partners first, asking what's on their shortlist and what they can actually get through their investment committee. That investor-first approach has pushed the practice into alternative asset classes like powered land, clustered student housing, and solar and battery storage, where risk-adjusted returns are more compelling than in traditional deals.

In this episode of The Dealmakers' Edge, Aaron Strauss and Adam Steinberg discuss how the equity advisory business has evolved over two decades, why common equity is harder to raise than preferred, what it takes to get a deal done, and how sponsors can position themselves to attract institutional capital for the first time.

3:18 - First real estate job as a financial analyst at Salomon Brothers during the early nineties recession

4:23 - Three lessons from Salomon Brothers that still drive how he works today

5:36 - Cornell, investment sales, and building a capital markets group at AEW

7:30 - Joining Ackman-Ziff in 2004 and growing the equity business

10:17 - How the practice evaluates deals and why time is the scarce resource

13:06 - Common equity versus preferred and mezzanine

15:04 - Reverse engineering deal flow by going to investors first

18:22 - Programmatic versus one-off deals and what a successful program requires

21:41 - When to stay with friends-and-family capital and when to move to institutional

23:26 - Using a recapitalized asset as a seed deal for an institutional partner

26:24 - Where the common equity market stands today

30:47 - Finding the mental break that forces you fully off the deal

Mentioned In Raising Common Equity and Building an Investor-First Practice with Adam Steinberg

Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group | LinkedIn

Adam Steinberg on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Aaron Strauss: You're listening to The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss, diving deep into stories behind commercial real estate leaders.

Hello everyone, welcome to The Dealmakers’ Edge. Today we're going to have Adam Steinberg on, who's a principal at Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group, who specialize in arranging JV equity partnerships, programmatic equity partnerships, preferred equity partnerships and MES loans. And since joining Ackman-Ziff in 2004, Adam has closed dozens and dozens of deals, aggregating billions of dollars of equity capital and he co-heads their equity business, as well as equity approval committee, which reviews and approves all new equity assignments. We're going to walk through Adam's career, his side on the principal side, his history there, how he thinks about deals, how he structures deals, big picture concepts for success in one's career and overall get a sense of where the market is for, for raising common equity today. So it's a great conversation and I hope you enjoy it. 

So welcome everybody to The Dealmakers’ Edge. Today I'm really excited to have Adam Steinberg on with us, who I've met over the years. He works at a fabulous organization of which I've met many people from the organization, over time, at Ackman-Ziff. And he is really, really deeply involved in many things. And today we're going to talk about his career arc, but also specifically day-to-day overseeing an equity practice and what that means and how he manages deal flow, how he executes, I mean, he's in the middle of so many exciting things. So we're going to hear all about it. And Adam, I just really want to thank you for taking the time today to be on with us. 

Adam Steinberg: My pleasure. Much appreciated. 

Aaron Strauss: And it's a little script sounding, maybe a little bit programmatic, but we're going to start from when you, you know, really where you went to college, where you first worked. I know some of those experiences we talked about offline, really inform how you structure deals today, how you help run the organization. So maybe you can walk the listeners through just kind of where you grew up, where you went to school and how you got started. 

Adam Steinberg: Sure. Yes. So I grew up in Swampscott, Massachusetts, which is a small town, north of Boston, which probably accounts for my lack of a Boston accent. I'm a proud product of the public school system there. My mother was a first grade teacher. My father was a top tax attorney, who became a real estate advisor, which helped lead me towards real estate. I graduated from Dartmouth in 1988. I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do when I was at Dartmouth. I think you spend much of your high school years trying to get into college. And then when you get there, you don't really think too much about where you want to go after college. So upon graduation, I did interview for a number of different things. And my first job was actually in retail, which is very unlike me in so many ways, because I really don't like to shop. But somehow I got recruited to work at the May Company. The recruiters were excellent. And I went through what was a buyer training program at the May Companies. And my first job was as a group sales manager in a store in downtown Hartford called G Fox and Company, which is no longer there. Anyway, the short story is it was an absolutely terrible fit and a real false start, but a learning experience. My first real job in real estate was as a financial analyst at Salomon Brothers, in the real estate group, in the early nineties, which did coincide with the early nineties recession. So it was sort of a fascinating time to be there. It was the end of the liar's poker era and John Goodfriend was still the CEO. He did have a gold bar paperweight on his desk and he, as I said, was the CEO. During my time there, he was actually forced to resign, due to a treasury bond trading scandal. And Berkshire Hathaway had a pretty significant preferred investment in Salomon Brothers. And I do remember Warren Buffett walking the floors and checking things out and talking to people. So while I was at Salomon Brothers, the global real estate group went from about 150 worldwide to 30. There are six of us analysts. We were really, we were spared, because our program was only two years and we weren't exactly a big draw on the bottom line. But there were a few key takeaways from my time there. The first is to really always look at the big picture. That was drilled into me. What are you, when you're presenting something, take a step back, does it make sense? And as an analyst, just learning the business, there are mistakes that you make and the more you start to think about pulling back and looking at the big picture, making sure it all makes sense, the better off you are. The second thing that was drilled into me was ATD, attention to detail. No detail is too small. You know, check your work multiple times and try not to make mistakes. And the third thing was really never stop pushing. Always move forward. As I said, the group was reduced from 150 to 30. And at a certain point it became clear there were going to be significant layoffs. Most of the senior professionals seemed to accept their fate, but there was one guy, who everybody thought was on the chopping block and he kept going. He kept pushing and he actually found a transaction that was actionable. And he saved his job by continuing to source opportunities, when others had essentially given up. So it was a really interesting, interesting lesson to see firsthand. After Salvin Brothers, I went to Cornell Business School, graduating in 1994. In the mid-90s, I worked for Investment Sales Group for a couple of years, then spent a couple of years working as a capital advisor, which is what I do now, for Boston Financial Group, which was then acquired by Land Lease, which really led to another interesting opportunity working at AEW. When I was hired at AEW, back in 2000, I was hired to help build a capital markets group. So we had a team of 10 or so folks that were doing essentially what I'm doing now, which is to raise capital for owners, operators from third party capital sources. It was going well. We were into it for maybe a year or so and one of our assignments was to raise a Mez fund for a group that was ultimately deemed to be a competitor of AEW. So that didn't go so well internally, because we, as the capital markets group, were competing against our own client services group. And the feeling was that investors, pension funds, endowments, et cetera, would only say yes to AEW so many times. So the group was disbanded, but most of us found homes elsewhere at AEW. And I wound up working for the Partners Group for about four years, which the Partners Group, they're in their 10th fund now it's an opportunity fund. When I was there, we were investing on behalf of Partners IV. It was a great principal experience, being on the principal side of the business really understanding the process to get a deal through the investment committee, the things that are important to investors, who have equity at risk. And it really, it does inform how I evaluate and think about and present deals today. 

Aaron Strauss: Amazing. 

Adam Steinberg: In 2004, I had the opportunity to join Ackman-Ziff and really help grow the equity business, which was just at that time only a few years old. But today I live in Newton, Massachusetts. I've been happily married to my wife for 30 years. I have three kids. They're 26, 23, and 17. And they would certainly get a kick out of hearing this podcast, because they often say that I sound like I'm conducting a a dad cast to an involuntary audience of three or four, when I talk about things like the relative absence of the skier responsibility code hosted at major mountains today versus back in the 80s, as it's very much needed today. How slow cars that remain in a passing lane, the two lane road are driving in an unsafe manner and the importance of a large clear ice cube, when serving a cocktail. 

Aaron Strauss: Wow. You covered a lot, but I want to and thank you for that. And by the way, I get flagged from my kids all the time. I mean, the bottom line is we're doing a lot, you know, we're raising families, we're fronting deals. We've got a whole life going on and everything you've done to date really informs what you're doing now. And people are a product of all their experiences, which are awesome. I just, I love the way you define that, those initial early lessons. I think a lot of people in the early parts of their career don't realize the lessons till many, many years later, but the concept of voicing the bigger picture, zooming out from the document, zooming out from that boardroom, is what's really, really at play. Never stop pushing. There's always something around the corner, no matter how hard it is. You always need to move forward, no matter what, inch or mile. And that attention to detail, my God, if… My entire world is detailed, right? I'm on the legal side. Your numbers are off, it's going to show. So owning that last comma, that last detail, basically makes you a professional versus an amateur, in my humble opinion. So I think those lessons are amazing. And so timeless, right? I'm sure even today you run on those principles. But speaking of today, let's fast forward a little bit. I mean, now the business you helped develop and grow at Ackman-Ziff, the equity business, has evolved a ton in those years you've developed it, since you joined in 2004. And it was already existing before. Maybe we could talk about the early years. I mean, kind of raising equity in the style you're doing today is probably vastly different than when you were working on it in 2004. I know the ethos of the firm about being relationship-oriented and long-term sustainable driven around those relationships never stops. But the style and manner in which you conduct business today is vastly different than 20 years ago. Maybe we could talk about those early years when you joined, how you kind of ran deals, looked at deals and then we could talk about progression over time too. 

Adam Steinberg: Happy to. Just maybe a quick intro for Ackman's, for those that don't know, we are a hundred year old firm. We're a boutique advisory firm. The firm was started by Larry Ackman's father and Bill Ackman's grandfather. Bill Ackman did work at, I think it was called Ackman Brothers back in the mid-80s, he did work for a short period of time and famously found other things to do to make money, but that created an opportunity for Simon Ziff, our president and leader. Simon joined in the mid-80s and became Larry's partner by the late 80s. He was instrumental, he and Larry, in deciding to start an equity group, in the late 90s. And I joined in 2004 and have been with Ackman-Ziff for 22 years, always focused on the equity business and really my sole focus has been common equity. And we'll talk about, I think we'll talk about the differences in a second. But when I started, there were really just two of us in the equity business. And today we've got more than a half dozen that are focused on raising common equity for our clients. And we really view it as an equity practice, because it does involve a certain skillset to understand what investors are looking for and matching the right investors with the right types of deals. And that process has really changed through the years. When I started back in 2004, as I said, there were just a couple of us and things weren't so formal. It was a bit like the Wild West in terms of, you had a lot of different folks who were originating a business and we didn't have a formal process for deciding what we wanted to take on. So we wound up taking on a lot of things and not really paying attention to the probability of success and the allocation of time. And if I fast forward to where we are today, it's a pretty formal process that we have, when we make a decision about whether we want to take on a deal or not. And we view it internally as the thing that we have, the thing that we want to be greedy about, is our time allocation. We don't have capital to invest, we have time to invest. So, we have to evaluate each deal, make the determination, will we be successful raising this capital or not? Specifically, as it relates to the equity, will our client accept preferred equity, if that's all that's available, or must they have common equity? The bar is much higher for “common”. And just the quick difference between preferred mezzanine and common equity is that mezzanine and preferred are structured and the investor is not in the first-class position. Their last dollar is 80 or 85% or whatever it may be. They have some protection. The sponsors return, they're subordinate to theirs, so they're in a senior position. With common equity, Hariprasut, you're both. Both the sponsor and the investor are in the same position. Both are exposed to first loss and there's a true alignment of interests, between the investor and the sponsor. Both want success, both are working towards the same goal. And you don't have a situation where, I'll just give an example, if it's a preferred structure and let's say you're developing a condominium and the sales aren't going as quickly as you'd like. As a preferred investor, you might say, well, let's just lower prices a little bit, let's make sure we can get these things sold as a sponsor. As a developer, you know that a lot of your profit is in the sale of those last 15 to 20% units. So you, you want to maximize the sales prices. So there's a little bit of a misalignment if your structure is pref, if it was common, you're all working towards the same goal. 

Aaron Strauss: Absolutely. And I guess with the allocation of time, I think a couple of concepts you hit on is that you're kind of reverse engineering, right? I mean, if every sponsor comes to you and says, I need equity, I need equity, which they all do. Right. But the investors are also telling you, they're seeking deals. It sounds as if you are reverse engineering, speaking to the capital first and finding the home for them, versus talking to every single sponsor and trying to fit the capital to their deals. Because if you only have time to share and you know where the money wants to flow, it should be presumably easier to flow it to the opportunity than forcing an opportunity on the capital. 

Adam Steinberg: Yes, no, that's exactly right. We haven't always done this, but certainly over the last few years, we've been much more proactive about reverse engineering assignments, asking equity, what do they want? What's on your short list? What can you get through your investment committee? And then going out and sourcing those opportunities, which leads us in different directions every year. What's been really productive for us over the… really over the last year, and we've closed a half dozen, big programmatic common equity races, is in the alternative spaces. So we've closed a powered land program, clustered student housing, solar power and battery storage system, and parking. We've done some more traditional programs as well, like an industrial program in the Midwest, but we're always looking for the niche strategies that have attractive risk-adjusted returns. That's really what works for investors. And it makes sense. If you think about where we are, in the cycle and the difficulty of investing common equity, if it's a traditional deal, where the metrics are solid, but upon sensitizing, you might sort of fall below that threshold. There's not a big margin of error in many traditional deals, especially when you start to think about investing common equity in those deals, whereas in the alternative spaces, you've got asymmetric return. You've got the potential for outsized returns for manageable risk. And that becomes very interesting to investors. So we are actively looking for more of those programs and we've got a whole bunch in our pipeline. And we, you know, again, we tend to gravitate towards what investors want. And maybe I'll just take a step back and talk about that for a second. Investors are really the lifeblood of our business and the relationships we have with them are incredibly important. We collectively and we have roughly 45 professionals at Ackman-Ziff, we are small. We are a boutique advisory firm. We spend a lot of time speaking with those investors, understanding what they want. Every time we share a deal with them, we always use the opportunity just to check in generally, to find out what's on their shortlist, edit their conferences. We have lunches and meetings, but gathering that information and sharing that is incredibly important to us. Knowing what investors want and being able to send the right deal to the right person at the right shop, is incredibly important. 

Aaron Strauss: Totally. What percent of the equity raising is programmatic? You know, we're going to go execute on this strategy and buy this many properties that fit these boxes, et cetera, versus one-off. I mean, I don't think anything you're really doing is one-off, because it's relationship driven, but if somebody says, I want to get into an office and one huge office tower is a massive transaction versus buying, you know, a hundred small bay industrial properties. So are you doing both? Are you really just focused on the programmatic or is it just a combo? 

Adam Steinberg: Yes, I mean, we are doing both. It really depends on the situation. Mostly our clients and investors do want to do repeat business. There's a learning curve, both in terms of time and money for a new partnership. They have to get to know one another. That takes time. And then there's your documentation, which is not inexpensive. So once you've committed that time, as well as the money to the partnership, you do want to do more together, if you can. So there's always that motivation. That doesn't mean that every single deal winds up being programmatic. There are plenty of standalone opportunities that are somewhat unique, where you might say, okay, this is a good one, let's look at this together, let's see if we can get this done. And if the opportunity arises in the future to do something, of course, we try to figure out a way to do it, but there may not be an active pipeline that looks similar to that initial deal, which is a very important component of a program. What you really want, when you think about programmatic raise, is really three things. It's the track record of the sponsor doing the thing that's being proposed and having a strong track record around that. It's an initial deal. It's a seed deal. It's something that the investor can dig into and determine this makes sense. I'd like this deal. I'm spending a lot of time with this one. And then it's the pipeline, where the sponsor shows an active pipeline access to deals that fit the mold of the initial seed property. So the idea is you're just doing more of the same. It's a wash, rinse, repeat. 

Aaron Strauss: Totally. Another question I have, and we see this a lot. We work with a lot of different clients doing a lot of different deals, at different stages of their career and different track records and different backgrounds. So sometimes I'm sure you get approached by people saying, hey, Adam, you know, I'd love to bring in my first institutional investor, you know, so it's been friends and family, it's been high net worth individuals. Maybe they have a buddy who works at a fund, who helped them with one deal, but there's a stretch period where they're not ready for institutional, but they have to kind of leave behind the safe, warm cocoon of just going to individual people and syndicating deal by deal. It's kind of this awkward stretch, but if you're coaching somebody, who's trying to become institutional capital ready. Maybe they've bought, I don't know, 10 properties. They're using the same old accountant they've used. Their reports are just kicking off a few basic things. They have an office manager. They're vertically degraded for the most part. But, you know, what are those critical elements that you need to morph from the syndicator, high net worth individual person to being worthy, in the eyes of institutional investors that, hey, this person is worth the risk that I can write a check for $50 million, $80 million and I'm ready for that? So what type of position do you need to put yourself in, besides just return on deals? How do you institutionalize yourself, to be ready for that next level investor? That's a question I post to you, because we get that all the time. 

Adam Steinberg: Yes, no, that's a great question. You know, a couple of thoughts on that. First is something that we share with all clients of ours and prospective clients of ours that are in that position, which is that as long as you have access to that friends and family capital, that high net worth capital that is either syndicated in some way, we think that you should do that. You're going to get the best economics from the friends and family investors and you're also going to have the most control over major decisions. When you do a partnership with an institutional style investor, whether it's a family office, iNetworth, a foreign group, a pension fund insurance company, whoever it might be, private equity fund, you're going to wind up doing a 90-10, 85-15, something like that, giving up major decision control. And there are economic distributions that will be within a range. It'll be a market or within a range, but it won't be as attractive as what you can get from friends and family, which might be a 50-50 over a six with full fees to the sponsor. So we always encourage our clients and prospective clients to stay with that group as long as they can. Now, there's a natural point, at which you run out of that capital. And when you do, that is the right time to start thinking about finding an institutional style partner. And when you get to larger deals, it's not always possible for folks to raise 25 or 50 million of equity. It gets a little bit hard, especially if you have friends already invested in a number of deals. And then it does make sense to pivot and to move forward. You know, one way that that can be done is if you look within your portfolio, maybe there's a deal that could be recapitalized and you could use that as a C deal, you control that deal. That can be the first deal that you bring to an institutional style investor and ask them to invest in it. You control it, you know it, you know where all those skeletons are buried, you know everything about it. So it becomes a pretty good opportunity, especially if that seed deal has a similar business plan to the thing that you want to do going forward. So maybe there's an asset that you acquired five years ago that could use a refresh. If it's a multifamily property, maybe you need another 10,000 to 15,000 per unit. And you could propose that that would be the strategy. You'd recapitalize, bring in new capital within an institutional style capital partner and then execute on a core plus slash value add renovation program. And if that's consistent with the go forward plan, it's a great way to seed a program. One other thing that's really important is the track record. If you need to have it sold, your properties and many, I think, sponsors who do friends and family tend to own longer term. They become attractive, cash flowing deals, nice cash on cash return, you refinance and then you're delivering 8% to 12% a year to the investor. So there is really no pressure to sell too early. So you might own a lot for a long period of time, but the important thing about the track record is to demonstrate that you, as a sponsor, have acquired and created value and you can demonstrate that value creation. So if you moved NOI from a million to a million seven, let's say, over some period of time, after executing on a value-add program, that's really interesting. Whether you've sold the asset or not, you've created value. And that creates a track record for a discussion, where you could demonstrate to an institutional-style investor, I know what I'm doing, I know how to create value. Even though I haven't sold anything, I can execute on this seed, recap on this pipeline. I'm just doing the same thing I've always done. 

Aaron Strauss: Absolutely. Well said. Let me ask you what you're seeing today. I mean, the last few years in the market have been choppy to say the least, from 23 jacking interest rates. A lot of people who bought from the years 21 to 23 in vintage properties went the wrong way on them, et cetera. It seems like in the last couple of years, everybody has launched a debt fund or only invest in Mez or first priority, commercial estate mortgages, et cetera, et cetera. But it sounds like the market really has been opening up more for the common equity. And I'm curious, how are you selecting these engagements? What are the investors excited about today? What are the types of deals you're trying to pencil and find for those investors? Where are we in this market, basically, is what I'm trying to ask. 

Adam Steinberg: Yes, it's always hard to say. I think that the common equity bar has lowered a little bit. It's always been high for 22 years. It's always a challenge to find common equity, again, because the investor is in that first loss position. So they're very careful. And I get one thing I'll mention, because I do get asked this question a lot, which is, would a common equity investor do a deal with a, let's say, less than favorable structure just to get it done. And we don't really see that happening very often. If the deal doesn't pencil, the common equity investor won't give you an unfavorable waterfall distribution, they'd rather not do the deal. And it makes sense, because let's say you, as a sponsor, have two capital partners and one has given you an unfavorable economic deal and the other has given you a market economic deal. Well, where are you going to allocate your time? You're going to spend all your time on the deal, where you have a better waterfall structure and you're more likely to make more money. So, common equity investors tend to just not do the deal as common equity or they'll pivot to Pref, which is what we saw a lot of over the last couple of years, common equity investors offering Pref investments as an alternative to common equity or some sort of a hybrid structure, which has components both of common and Pref. But in both cases, they're not taking that first loss position as a common equity investor. So we've seen the bar a little bit lower today. I'll give you an example. We are working on a ground up rental deal in Long Island. It's roughly 135 million total capitalization. Our assignment was to raise about 42 million of LP common equity, which we began, back in October. And this was a deal, because our client owns the property. Today, they only wanted common equity. They didn't want Pref. If they wanted to do Pref, they really could have just contributed the imputed value in the property and then leveraged up. They wanted a common equity partner to do this deal, to do other deals that they have in their pipeline. They have a lot of development stuff that they want to do in their pipeline. So they wanted to use this deal that they controlled as a seed deal to start conversations with active common equity investors. So, just going back over the last couple of years, we've mostly passed on assignments where we were required to raise common equity. We felt that the market was really challenging for common equity investments in ground-up deals of all types. And we wanted to make sure that if the only thing that was available was Pref, that our client was okay with that. We made an exception for this deal and we did so, because we felt that it was a very strong deal. It checked a lot of the boxes, location terrific, real barriers to entry in the market, not a lot of competition, not a lot of new supply, just given specific location, very strong sponsorship and really good deal metrics, all of which we thought would be compelling to investors. We went to the market and we did get a significant amount of common equity interest and we are moving forward and hopefully closing on that in the next month or so, with a common equity source. But it does, I think, demonstrate that the market is a little better today than it was. We were able to find real interest in the conversations that we had with investors. There were 30 plus that really engaged with us. Now we didn't get 30 proposals, but that's a lot of interest for a common equity only capital race. So from that feedback, our conclusion was that the bar is a little bit lower. We should be looking at taking on more ground up rental deals, where we can check the boxes on the market, the sponsorship and the deal metrics. 

Aaron Strauss: That makes sense. I have to ask you one more question too. You've been involved in so much deal-making over the years. You've rode the ups and downs of many markets, many individual deals. Fascinating, successful career. You know, one of the things on the podcast we always want to ask is about the mental health aspect of being in the deal-making world. I mean, you're literally riding the roller coaster's ups and downs and will it close and will this deal go bust for a million reasons you can't control. What kind of headspace do you try to maintain on a regular basis to show up in this crazy business we find ourselves in? And what kind of messages do you tell yourself as you go on this emotional rollercoaster that everyone in this deal community rides day to day? Because I think that's a key thing to try to tease out of people as younger people, maybe listening to this and thinking, you know, how am I going to stomach the ups and downs? And I think it's very valuable, because you've really, you've seen a lot, Adam. And I think that'd be wonderful if you could share. 

Adam Steinberg: Sure. No, I think that you want to somehow try to avoid the highs and lows and to be able to take a step back. And as you said, Aaron, it really did take a mental break. And for everybody, that's a little bit different, but it's incredibly important. So for years, I grew up playing hockey, as a kid. I grew up in, as I said, in Swampscott in the seventies during the Bobby Orr era. So every kid played hockey and I rediscovered it, maybe a dozen years ago and wound up playing again, for eight to ten years. I've since retired from playing hockey, but there's nothing like playing hockey to have a mental break. It's something that when you're out there on the ice, you're only thinking about the game that you're playing, physically and mentally, it's a hundred percent. And I think it's something that everybody should find. You don't necessarily, it doesn't have to be for three days, it's an hour. You're out playing on the ice for an hour, doing it two or three times a week and it was just very healthy, mentally and physically. So I think it's important for everybody to find the thing that gives them that relaxation, in the middle of the day, or the end of the day, because we all need those short mental breaks. And with the way things are today, we don't necessarily get longer mental breaks. We're all connected all the time. And you have to set aside some time so that you're at least getting that mental break. And the other thing I'll say that I've learned, I've just found this for myself and mentioned it to other people, some of the younger people that I've worked with, analysts and associates, is that if you're struggling with something after hours, it's getting late, it's many times better just to go home. Take a break, take a mental break, get a good night's sleep, wake up early, set your alarm for 5 am, 6 am and then try to get that thing done that you were working on the night before. And my personal experience is that a much more effective first thing in the morning with a clear head, grab a cup of coffee, start working and you can do some of your best work between 5 am and 7.30 am. 

Aaron Strauss: Well said. I really appreciate the conversation. I know our listeners will too. You're on the front lines of some incredible deal making and a great history to boot of a wonderful career to date. Can't wait to watch further deal announcements and everything else you're going to make happen in your future. And again, I just really want to thank you for the time.  

Adam Steinberg: Great, thanks, Aaron. 

Aaron Strauss: Thank you for joining The Dealmakers’ Edge. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platform. And please give us a five-star rating so more people can follow the conversation.