Meet the secretive banker behind Warren Buffett's latest deal
BDT Capital Partners
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought 38.6% of the Pilot Flying J truck-stop chain on Tuesday, and a firm you've probably never heard of played a key role.
BDT & Company advised Pilot Flying J on the deal with its in-house finance arm, BDT Capital Partners, exiting its minority investment in the company.
Not heard of BDT & Company? That's by design. Despite having more than $12 billion in assets under management, the firm doesn't even have a public-facing website.
It does, however, have more than 150 employees spread out over four offices in Chicago, New York, London, and Frankfurt, Germany, who advise extremely wealthy clients with family-owned businesses.
The firm intentionally flies under the radar to court billionaires — like Buffett, the Waltons, and the Webers, to name a few — who value privacy.
In this case, Jimmy Haslam's family will remain as the majority shareholder in Pilot Flying J, while Haslam will stay as CEO. In addition, the Maggelet family will keep 11.3% ownership until 2023, at which point Berkshire will take over the majority stake.
Byron Trott, a Midwest native who founded BDT, still helms the company from its Chicago headquarters inside the historic Wrigley Building.
Here's how Trott went from a small-town football player to an investment banker advising billionaires:
Byron Trott was born in 1958 and grew up in Union, Missouri, a small town about an hour from St. Louis.
Source: Horatio Alger Association.
When a teacher used him as an example of a "chubby boy," Trott doubled-down on athletics, and he was named a "scholar-athlete" by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper.
He graduated in the top 5% of his class, too.
He eventually left Union to attend the the University of Chicago, where he played first base for the school's baseball team, before graduating in 1981.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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