Announcer 0:00
From Los Angeles. This is the Echelon Radio Network.

Jerri Hemsworth 0:04
Hi. This is Jerri Hemsworth, and this is the Echelon radio podcast. And today I’m sitting with Jordi Pujol. how you doing Jordi?

Jordi Pujol 0:21
good, doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

Jerri Hemsworth 0:23
Oh, I’m so happy. I know we had a couple false starts, but I’m so I’ve been looking forward to interviewing you, because I want to know more about what you do. So you’re with Objective, right?

Jordi Pujol 0:33
That’s right. So objective is our company, and we do two things. We make it pretty simple for everyone. One is valuation, and the other one is sales M&A so we help sell companies and we help value companies, and that’s the, that’s the message that I want to send out, and that’s what we do.

Jerri Hemsworth 0:51
Yeah, and you’re now the managing director there, correct?

Jordi Pujol 0:55
I’m a managing director, yes

Jerri Hemsworth 0:57
Okay.

Jordi Pujol 0:57
We have a few, and everybody has a slightly different specialty. A lot of the time it’s going to be industry related. But I, like I said, I said more on the valuation side, and some of so my colleagues sit a little bit more on the investment banking side, where everybody does a little bit of similar things, like financial modeling, assistance with pricing, assistance with understanding the market, and I guess the other situations that help price a company. But I do it from a much more technical standpoint, a much more theoretical standpoint, in a way, and they do it much more from a market standpoint.

Jerri Hemsworth 1:35
Gotcha, do you have an industry specialty?

Jordi Pujol 1:39
I do. Yes, I spent a lot of my former years working in the technology space. And I always used to have a major, minor combination with my major being Software as a Service, and my minor being life sciences, kind of biotech, med tech. And then I made a switch and made my biotech kind of my main focus, health tech. A lot of the technology companies were seeking to apply it in the healthcare industry, and so I made a little bit of a switch with a lot more focus in that area. But obviously I keep my hardware, software, kind of skills as much as I can.

Jerri Hemsworth 2:13
Was that a conscious switch, or was it just the way that the clients and everything happened?

Jordi Pujol 2:19
A little bit of both. I think there was a natural transition, like I said, of software moving into the healthcare space, more companies opening cloud, more companies opening up services that involve technology. And I saw an opportunity there to potentially become a partner at UI. And so that became kind of my focus. Obviously, shortly after I decided to make a move to to objective, but I’ve tried to keep my focus as much as possible. Obviously, being in LA, you get to experience everything, right? Media and entertainment companies. You get to see manufacturing, you get to see industrials, you get to see all kinds of different e commerce and retail companies. Yeah, so it’s a, it’s an exciting city to be in. I think,

Jerri Hemsworth 3:01
yeah, it’s kind of a trip. I think it’s almost like you can pick and choose. Oh, let’s try this, you know, or let’s, let’s go after that. But do you get, do you tend to get leads from all over the place, or are they pretty much central to the med tech area?

Jordi Pujol 3:19
So I feel like it’s definitely a hodgepodge of industries, with a lot of the more technical work being in that kind of biotech space, in that technology space, I do a lot of software companies with different applications. Some can be to the healthcare world, but a lot of them are just primarily enterprise software companies. And the reason for that is I used to do valuations for portfolio companies, and a lot of the big investors from San Francisco and Los Angeles focus on those industries. So 70, 80% of their portfolios would really be technology companies, or, I guess, retail companies pretending to be technology companies. But that that’s kind of how the focus kept, kept going, because I always worked with these asset managers that worked with private companies, and now primarily what I do is value private companies.

Jerri Hemsworth 4:08
And do you find a lot of your clients are local, or they tend to go upstate or across the states?

Jordi Pujol 4:15
We do a lot of work in Southern California and San Francisco. Obviously, that’s where a lot of our contacts are, right are our referral partners really are the CPAs, the MNA lawyers, the estate attorneys that are in the SoCal area, but we have a person in Denver. A lot of us have connections to the East Coast, so we’ll get referrals from the East Coast. And we used to have a practice in Dallas, and that’s how we keep some of our Texas clients, but it’s it’s a much more local market, and so we tend to focus in solving California,

Jerri Hemsworth 4:46
with the with California and the economy and everything. Here are you seeing many clients moving out of state, or have intentions to leave the state?

Speaker 1 4:57
And we’ve seen some transitions, and there’s always. Tax considerations. But I think when when the markets are in California, you always want to be here yourself, right? Just just like we have a focus on referral partners and clients and being local and seeing them face to face, a lot of our clients have the same focus, right? So they tend to be California companies, family owned companies, and they’ve built networks in the city for, you know, 50 years, 40 years, 60 years, depending on the company and and that’s the way they want to keep it. Like I said, the tax situation is always enticing to move out of state. And a lot of companies are growing really fast, and they’re finding that the national markets really, are really receptive to their services and to their products?

Jerri Hemsworth 5:42
Yeah, I bet, I bet. So you mentioned that a lot of your referral partners being M&A folks, attorneys, accountants. Is it pretty equal across the board, or is there one specifically that you tend to get more?

Speaker 1 6:02
It’s it’s, well, split a lot of the time. There are attorneys that do M&A functions, but also do corporate functions, and those tend to be a lot more in touch, I guess, with the needs of the companies. So they’ll call us for financial reporting, they’ll call us for tax situations, they’ll call us for personal planning from the side of the founders and of the owners, but it tends to be pretty split, right. CPAs sometimes have a better connection to the business, especially on the financial reporting side, and because that’s a big part of what we do, we also tend to get a lot of referrals from them. So that’s typically how it works in the startup space. You know, their attorney is a really important touch point. Whoever made the formation documents, whoever’s helping them with the race, you know, commercial contract, and so they’ll call us to value IP, to value the company for any type of pre race purpose, or even for the foreign ace post race so that they can issue equity to their employees.

Jerri Hemsworth 7:03
Gotcha, what really lights your fire about what you do?

Speaker 1 7:08
So, you know, I I got asked the question of how I got into valuation, and part of it is circumstantial, and part of it is kind of really digging deep to try and see where it all came from. And I was thinking about when I was a kid, and my grandma used to kind of put us to bed, I guess, and tell us stories. It was a huge thing that it’s like, oh, I want my grandma to sit on the bed with me and tell me a story. And she always used to talk about her horses, her prior marriage, and

Jerri Hemsworth 7:38
her bedtime story, exactly.

Speaker 1 7:41
It’s fine, because I grew up hearing about my grandfather in a good way. She wasn’t, she wasn’t that mean, but she always talked a lot about her rings, too. And to me as a kid, you know, this little rocks on someone’s finger don’t really mean much, like, you know, it’s hard to understand money at that age. And, you know, some some stones, and you don’t think much of it. So whatever, they’re shiny, I kind of understand that they’re somehow valuable. So I realized that, okay, maybe I should start collecting these. So I go out into the garden, and she used to have these kind of like quartz rocks that now are like $20 at their local fair market because they have powers and they’re crystals. But at the time, there were just quartz stones on the ground. And so obviously, got a little bag, and I collected a bunch, and I went and told my dad, like, Hey, I think we’re rich, I got a bag full of these guys. And he kind of said, like, No, those are not really the valuable ones, right. And again, as a kid, you’re so confused. Of well, she’s telling me, these tiny ones that look pretty much exactly like these other ones are so much more valuable. And with that, there were so many situations that always, always confused me. And I think that drive to figure out, why does the stock market change so quickly? Why is Tesla one day the most valuable company, but then it’s Microsoft the next day, and then Amazon the following day, understanding these big jumps in the market and these crashes, right? I think it would all always, it always drew me in. And I studied economics to try and understand the macroeconomic world. I then studied finance to try and understand the microeconomic world. And ultimately, I closed everything up with an MBA, which helped me understand the business world, yeah, so I feel like I have a good, good understanding now, but I’m often shocked about valuation. So I’ll tell

Jerri Hemsworth 9:28
you that much I can only imagine, like, some of the stuff that you see, and it goes up and down depending on what’s hot or what’s not, you know, and, and it’s with, you know what used to be five years ago, very valuable today, could be squat or vice versa. What was squat then is, like, incredibly valuable now.

Speaker 1 9:50
That’s exactly right. And the velocity of change, I think, has, has increased a lot, and so. So to me, I always try to separate what’s price and what’s value. And. And, and I think that’s the hardest thing, because the premise around valuation is a price that you would get today in an actual transaction, right? So even the premise is a little bit flawed in that sense. But the idea is that you’re, you’re truly looking for the value, not not the price, right,

Jerri Hemsworth 10:15
right? Hey, Jordy, Where’d you grow up?

Speaker 1 10:19
Um, so I was telling you about my grandma. So my grandma used to live in Mexico, and I used to spend a lot of my summers there, but I actually grew up in Costa Rica.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:19
Oh did you?

Speaker 1 10:20
So yet, yet, another foreign country, but I spent most of my childhood there. It was a really fun place to grow up. It was just as beautiful back then, except it had no roads, and it’s a lot harder to get to places, and obviously no GPS. But it was super fun, super safe. I still have a lot of good friends there and a lot of good memories from from growing up there.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:53
Yeah, it’s that’s a beautiful place. We’ve been there, and we want to go back, because it’s just one of the coolest places we’ve been.

Speaker 1 11:01
Oh, that’s great to hear. Yeah, I’m surprised that the first time that I came to college, so a long time ago, I won’t say I won’t age myself, but a long time ago,

Jerri Hemsworth 11:12
It couldn’t be older than me.

Speaker 1 11:14
That’s fair. A little bit a little bit younger, yeah, but Yeah, nobody really knew about it, right? I would still getting the question of, like, but do you guys have, like, McDonald’s? You guys have, you know, like, standard stuff and interactive and I’d be like, of course, like, if you drive down the road to get to my house, there’s a Tony Roma’s, and there was a TGI Fridays. McDonald’s was on the left, yeah, you know, standard place. And, and now everybody that I meet is like, Oh my God, I want to go there. I already went there. My parents went there. I have a friend who just got back from there. It’s amazing to see the the tourism and the growth, and I’m glad that that it’s going that way. It’s brought a lot of good things to the country.

Jerri Hemsworth 11:55
I’ve I’ve often said if somebody offered me a vacation to Hawaii or Costa Rica. Which would I pick? And it would be Costa Rica every time.

Speaker 1 12:05
That’s a tough one. That is a tough one. I’ve had some fantastic trips to Hawaii as well.

Jerri Hemsworth 12:10
Yeah, yeah, but they don’t have the monkeys.

Jordi Pujol 12:13
That’s true, that’s true.

Jerri Hemsworth 12:14
or the iguanas on the beach,

Jordi Pujol 12:16
that’s true. It’s, it’s amazing. Every time I go, I just seen all the animals run wild. It’s, it’s a really, it’s a really big shock that it still happens with like, mega resorts behind them, right?

Jerri Hemsworth 12:27
Yeah, for sure. So then, how did you make your way up to Pennsylvania?

Jordi Pujol 12:33
So, yeah, I had an interesting college counselor that was very east coast biased, and she told us, don’t go to the west coast. It’s a terrible place. And now I obviously regret it, because I think my personality is a lot more California than it is New York. But at the time, you know, I took, I took her advice, and I decided to make my way to Pennsylvania, and I think it was a great decision. I had a great time. I was able to live in the winter, which was a novelty.

Jerri Hemsworth 13:04
I was gonna say, How did you adjust it?

Jordi Pujol 13:06
You know, I went from a 30 person graduating high school class to a 300 person college class, but all of my friends graduated from like, 3000 person high schools, right? So to me, the scale was 10x to them, it was 10, 10x smaller, but it was, it was a really beautiful college. It’s a National Arboretum. You know, I had a great time in Philadelphia. It’s a really awesome city, and made a lot of a lot of good friends. And studying liberal arts allows you the opportunity to really take from many subjects. And as much as I learned from mathematics, I learned from statistics, I learned from economics, but I also learned it from English literature and Spanish literature and art history. And so I feel like in your later years, a lot of that seemingly useless knowledge really comes together in the way that you are able to abstract and the way that you’re able to talk about problems and solve problems, because you have a lot more to pick from. So liberal arts was really a fantastic education, in my opinion.

Jerri Hemsworth 14:04
Yeah. And you went to Swarthmore, right?

Jordi Pujol 14:07
That’s right, yeah. So very unique college with a very unique student population. But you know, some of my best, best years are obviously back in that time.

Jerri Hemsworth 14:18
And then did you know right away you wanted to get your MBA, or did you wait?

Jordi Pujol 14:21
I did. I knew pretty much right away that that’s what I wanted to do. I still went a little bit more the economics route at first, and did a few internships in in that world and in the research world, thinking maybe I would be able to explain the world to folks, and then decided that I’d rather play the game than try to understand the game. And that’s how I got into business.

Jerri Hemsworth 14:44
And where did you get your MBA?

Jordi Pujol 14:48
I went to Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, so kind of close to to my college, but I did a lot of the classes in San Francisco, just having that connection to the technology world. And. And yeah, great, great decision to to be so close to Silicon Valley, and a lot of the entrepreneurship classes that I was able to take really opened my eyes to how difficult business can be. Honestly, I’m amazed at how our clients handled their growth years, how they handled the tough years, how they handled situations back in 2008 and when covid hit. And so being in that kind of driver’s seat of being the fake entrepreneur, because we do a lot of kind of like fake businesses that we start and we take out into the real world, I learned at least a little bit of what it is, it is to be on their side.

Jerri Hemsworth 15:36
Yeah, I bet. How did you get to San Francisco? Was it internships, like you said, or was it?

Jordi Pujol 15:42
No. So a lot of my clients, I guess, were in San Francisco, and I’ve always, like I said, been connected to the technology world, and so I used to spend a lot of time in San Jose and Milpitas and Mountain View and all these random places at client sites. And honestly, it was a great time, because they always have amazing food, they have beautiful campuses and really great people. I think the technology world attracted really smart but really down to earth people and so, yeah, it was just a great time to be able to spend so much time in the Bay Area.

Jerri Hemsworth 16:22
So your college counselor said, Don’t go west coast.

Jordi Pujol 16:26
That’s right.

Jerri Hemsworth 16:27
Yeah, and you ended up there. Are you still in contact with that college counselor?

Speaker 1 16:33
You don’t know, but I should reach out again. I think she guided us in the right direction. Funny enough, my best friend went to USC. My wife did her PhD at USC. She’s, She’s worked at SDSU, at UCLA, and so now we have so many West Coast connections, and I’m really happy to have established that that connection here. So it’s always difficult to think that at one point this was not even a possibility. And I’m just, I’m happy that I’m here now.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:05
There’s no mistakes. You know

Jordi Pujol 17:07
exactly

Jerri Hemsworth 17:07
You had to go east coast for a reason, but you ended up, I mean, you get, you get where you’re supposed to be,

Jordi Pujol 17:13
fair enough, exactly west coast, best coast.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:16
Yeah, most of the time.

Jordi Pujol 17:19
most of the time, you’re right most of the time. It’s not without its issues. Yeah, exactly.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:22
And it doesn’t have the winters like PA and, you know.

Jordi Pujol 17:27
I can deal with that going to class in, you know, six feet of snow, the kind of like old tales that parents tell you, it’s actually true and difficult. The snow gets dirty

Jerri Hemsworth 17:38
And cold.

Jordi Pujol 17:39
and it’s cold and it’s, you know, 7am trying to get to class, not not as fun as it looks in the movies,

Jerri Hemsworth 17:47
especially a kid from Costa Rica.

Jordi Pujol 17:50
Exactly. Idid have a gigantic down jacket, so that at least saved me from the real cold.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:58
Jordi. What do you do when you’re not working? What do you love? What are your hobbies?

Jordi Pujol 18:01
So, I always try to stay fed. It’s always been a really big part of my my journey, and it started in college. We were forced to take PE classes. So I took golf, I took squash, I took tennis, and then I think the final year was like, weightlifting, and got really into it. And I’ve always tried to get out into the gym. I always try to run until my knees hurt and then I back down a little bit. But I’ve always been really, really into fitness and training, and, yeah, just stay, stay inactive. My wife really likes to hike, so I go along very beautiful hikes in Los Angeles and San Diego areas. But I don’t know if I would do that every weekend, but definitely something really nice.

Jerri Hemsworth 18:48
It’s not asaction packed to some of the other sports.

Jordi Pujol 18:51
Exactly.

Jerri Hemsworth 18:54
And then, do you have siblings?

Jordi Pujol 18:57
I do. Yeah. My brother lives in Toledo, not Ohio in Toledo, Spain. Yeah, he’s an onocologist. Today is his birthday,

Jerri Hemsworth 19:06
Happy Birthday.

Jordi Pujol 19:07
so, yeah, got, got to talk to him right at midnight before he went to bed.

Jerri Hemsworth 19:12
Wow, do you guys travel much?

Jordi Pujol 19:14
We try to, I made a joke in this meeting the other day that in New York people, after being there for a while, they learn to speak conductor, right? They finally understand what the conductors are saying in the subway, because it just sounds like exactly and we’ve gotten really good at speaking immigration officer, so never gotten into trouble, always able to get into the countries. We’ve had some interesting run ins of not having visas, having the wrong passport, but we always seem to to get through. So yeah, definitely love traveling, and if I can keep doing that for for the next few years, I’m always going to try and prioritize it.

Jerri Hemsworth 19:54
That’s so cool. Well, Jordi, thank you so much for sitting down with me, and I love learning more about what you do and who you are. It’s been a real pleasure.

Jordi Pujol 20:04
Yeah. Thank you so much for this opportunity, and hopefully, hopefully other people can ask me about my childhood in Costa Rica, or growing up and doing sports. I always love to talk about those things and connect with people through fitness and through other fun things. You

Jerri Hemsworth 20:20
You got it. Thanks so much. Take care.

Jordi Pujol 20:23
Thank you. Bye.

Jerri Hemsworth 20:24
Bye

Announcer 20:35
Presented by Echelon Business Development. More than just networking. Way more.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai