Attending ACG SoCal 2025 this past month – coming roughly five months after being at ACG DealMAX 2025 in Las Vegas in April – reminded me once again how fast market sentiment can shift.
In Vegas in April, tariff concerns, market volatility, and broader macroeconomic uncertainty were dampening deal confidence. By September in LA, that fog had lifted.
The mood in Beverly Hills was light and confident, with a shared, unspoken understanding eternally characteristic of all hot and good deal markets – aka there is no “macro” reason to not do a deal, leaving the deal conversations focused intently and exclusively on the “micro” merits of the deal itself. Hallelujah.
This general bullishness was further evidenced in the financial product innovations on exciting display at the conference.
Of these, I found those in what I would describe as “Entrepreneurial Credit” most intriguing – creative debt structures ranging from PE firms borrowing against their portfolio assets to fund additional acquisitions, to secondary lending that provide liquidity to institutional and executive private equity holders, often with significant tax advantages compared to traditional equity sales.
Innovations like these are particularly relevant and valuable to independent investment bankers like us, as their complexity plays to the strengths of seasoned bankers who combine creativity with execution discipline and high, fiduciary standards of client care.
Also, of course and as expected, almost every conference panel was about AI and how it is revolutionizing the deal process – origination, diligence, execution, and more.
Yet…my counterintuitive reality at the conference was dealmaking seemingly becoming even more reliant on in-person trust and human connection!
My favorite example here was a GTS platform banker at the conference sharing a story of a buyer who had rejected a deal over email, only to reverse course after meeting the banker in-person, with that face-to-face pitch catalyzing an LOI offer on that once rejected deal a mere 2 weeks later!
Finally, a practical conference attendance observation: preparation pays. Gone are the days of flying into a conference, wandering panels, chatting over cocktails, and hoping for serendipity.
ACG has a great conference culture (and phone app) to pre-book meetings. With it, in just 2 days I was able to set and have almost 20 target face-to-face meetings with PE, Family Office, securities attorneys, accountants and more. This “plan to meet in advance” is a MO is a simple but profound change in conference culture and behavior with an outsized impact on outcomes Highly recommended!
Net net, ACG LA’s was a highly optimistic dealmaker gathering where innovation in deal structures and financial products was showcased, AI was always presented as both a giant threat and even bigger opportunity, and above all human connection remaining at the heart of getting deals done.
Let’s lean into it all, and make this the best deal quarter of all of our lives! Why not??