B-Schooled Podcast Episode #302: Paul Altman on 25 Years of Consumer M&A and Building Brands That Last

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Timestamps refer to the audio.

Stacy Blackman: Welcome to B-Schooled, the podcast by Stacy Blackman Consulting. I’m Stacy Blackman, and for more than 20 years I’ve worked with ambitious, high-potential people navigating business school and everything that comes after. This series is called Paths Less Traveled. In it, I’m sitting down with MBA grads whose paths evolved over time in unexpected ways. These are conversations about optionality, reinvention, and what’s really possible when you stop thinking about the MBA as a first job and start thinking about it as a foundation. Let’s get into it.

Stacy: Today we’re exploring a different kind of path less traveled. It’s not one of frequent reinvention, but a path of really incredible longevity and building deep vertical expertise. So today I want to welcome Paul Altman. Hi, Paul.

Paul Altman: Hi, Stacy. How are you?

Stacy: Good. Thank you for joining me. I’m just going to quickly read Paul’s bio, and then we’ll dive into the conversation. Paul is a Partner and Managing Director at The Sage Group, which he joined at its inception in 2000. He focuses on consumer M&A transactions, advising high-growth lifestyle brands on deals across multiple subsectors, including e-commerce, specialty retail, apparel and accessories, home, CPG, wellness, and beauty and personal care. So let’s start at the beginning. You graduated from undergrad at Wharton, right? At Penn.

Paul: Yes.

Stacy: And then you went on.

Paul: Can I say, for the podcast, that I’ve known you since then, since freshman year?

Stacy: Yes. I may have been on your first date with your wife.

Paul: You were. I wasn’t going to go there, but you were. And she’s still my wife, which is good. So yes, I was at Wharton. I did that for four years. It was finance and entrepreneurial management. I loved Penn. It was a great experience for me.

Stacy: So then you went to Lehman. What was that ’90s banking experience like? And what did you identify that made you say, I need to go back to graduate school?

Paul: There’s a little more to the path. My senior year, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I applied to law schools and investment banks. I did the whole interview thing with investment banks on Wall Street, got some offers, but I also got into some law schools. And I really wasn’t sure. I’m not sure why I was applying to law schools, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

Stacy: I think that’s true now as well. And certainly then, law school was kind of the catch-all. We don’t know what we’re going to do, so go to law school.

Paul: Right. Yes. So I applied to a number of schools, and one I got into was Michigan Law. I was a Michigan resident, because I grew up in Michigan. But I was really leaning toward Wall Street. I liked finance, a lot of my friends were going there, and they wine and dine you on the superdays. It just felt very exciting.

Paul: [03:40] So I reached out to Michigan, and they agreed to give me a two-year deferral and keep in-state tuition if I wanted to come after my two-year analyst program. So I started down that path, which felt a little like a way to be both risk-seeking and risk-averse at the same time, and to keep the optionality. I didn’t really think about it in those terms then. But when I got to Lehman, I liked it a lot, and I noticed that a number of senior people at the firm had law backgrounds and law degrees.

So I thought, okay, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I should rewind a little. Before I got to Wall Street, over spring break of my senior year, I took the GMAT because I thought, well, maybe I want to go to B-school. So when I was at Lehman, I applied to Michigan’s business school and got in. I actually didn’t apply anywhere else, because I already had the in-state tuition set up, and I thought the law school was great. And what I knew about Ross, which was called Michigan Business School at that point, was very solid.

Stacy: And little did you know that in 2026 they’d win the basketball championship. Last night.

Paul: I know. Well, while I was there, it got the number one ranking in BusinessWeek, which the school was so crazy about. We could all talk about what rankings mean or don’t mean, but it was still exciting. So, look, when I was in banking, it was a brutal lifestyle. I was working until two or three in the morning, six nights a week.

After a couple of years, I was ready to go back to school. I was ready for something new. So we got married, and you were there, and then Marnie and I went to Ann Arbor, and that was it. My first year was in the law school, my second year was in the business school, and my third and fourth years I mixed. But I never took the bar, and I really leaned in on the business school side.

Stacy: So while you were there, you made the decision that. I mean, I’m sure law has been helpful, but you were going the business route.

Paul: Yeah. I don’t have any regrets about doing the joint degree, because it really helped me market myself. People jump to the conclusion that you’re more of an achiever if you do that. I don’t know if that’s true, but you certainly like school more. There’s a point where people have to choose. You either go the law route or the business route. It’s hard to find a job or a career that’s both at that stage. Over time both can be, but recruiters get very confused if you’re doing a law internship, then a business one, then a law one over your three summers. Like, what do you want to be?

Paul: [06:33] That said, my first year I hadn’t been in the business school yet, so I did a law internship at General Motors, on their tax staff. It was not that exciting, but it was good for the résumé.

Stacy: That does not sound exciting.

Paul: No. I remember it was very bureaucratic. I wanted to get voicemail on my phone so that if someone left me a message, I could listen to it. But I didn’t have an approved corporate purpose to have voicemail signed off by a manager. It was that kind of place. But then I really focused on the business school side. I just liked the culture over there. I’m still close with people I met there. That was where my social base was. And ultimately Marnie, my wife, also got her MBA there, but you had something to do with that. You were an inspiration for her.

Stacy: Tell me a little about your experience at Ross. What were some takeaways, personal, professional, or academic, or highlights of the experience?

Paul: I definitely saw that the minute people got there, it was very much about the job search. I had just left a job, so I wasn’t quite ready for that mindset. But that didn’t mean everybody had to act that way the whole time. There was just that culture of, what are you doing for your internship? It starts quickly. I took a bit of a different route. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in banking, so I spent more time leaning into venture capital. When I was at Michigan, I started the Venture Capital Club. We initiated the Wolverine Venture Fund, which was one of the first of its kind.

Stacy: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Paul: Do you know the Wolverine Venture Fund? It’s still in existence.

Stacy: I know about it, yeah.

Paul: And then I had my first internship in business school at Intel’s venture capital group, so I was in that zone. My third summer of the four, I worked at DLJ, which was a predecessor to CSFB, UBS, and now Moelis. I worked there as a summer associate in LA, and then came out full-time. So that’s what I did in my internships.

In terms of business school, I still talk to some of my section mates. I just connected a couple of them to some other people. Marnie and I are actually traveling this weekend to meet someone we spent a lot of time with in business school. So I built some real friendships. It gave me confidence for the recruiting cycle. I liked that I had a whole infrastructure to help me look for that job, because eventually I did need to find one again.

And it helped me appreciate banking when I left it, because everybody was so excited to get into it, and I was like, well, there are pros and cons. But I really liked the people at Lehman. This was 15 years before they got into any trouble. They were super nice people, very collegial. It was an environment I thrived in.

So I started thinking about it again, because I realized that when I told people what I did, I enjoyed it. Investment banking gets lumped in as this albatross or this monolith, but there are so many different ways to do it, so many different types of companies, and so many different kinds of practices. At Lehman, I was in their M&A group, then their media and telecom group.

Then I was a generalist over the summer, and full-time at DLJ, I was a generalist too, doing anything and everything. That was very much a New York, East Coast banking culture at DLJ LA. After about seven months there, the opportunity came to connect with Sage, and we were off to the races.

Stacy: [10:54] Okay, well, let’s talk about Sage. You joined Sage right at its inception, which feels like a pretty bold move. You’d gone through all this prestigious education, you had a wife, you had a very secure job, maybe you had a house, and then you joined this new firm. What made you take the risk?

Paul: You have these moments in your career, and that was an inflection point for me. DLJ was losing a lot of people to dot-coms. They were dangling a lot of money in front of people to stick around and commit to a couple of years without looking for another job. It was a catalyst for me to say, well, I’m not happy here. It wasn’t a culture fit. I didn’t feel appreciated. Very bright people, a lot of smart people, but it just wasn’t my culture. So I ended up spending the next three months looking for a job. I quit without another job to go to.

Stacy: Oh, okay.

Paul: Yeah. People like Ken and Melissa were very supportive and wished me well, but they were probably thinking, what are you doing? The next day, the NASDAQ had its largest point drop ever, and I’m just sitting there on my couch. But for some reason, I felt confident, or relaxed, that I’d rather just be happy.

I didn’t have kids yet. I was married, but maybe that would have been different. Then, through multiple parties, I got connected to The Sage Group. I was ready for a change and something smaller where I could make an impact. When we started Sage, there were five or six of us. We’re still not that large.

Stacy: Was there a grown-up in the mix?

Paul: There was a grown-up in the mix. One of my partners is still with us and works with us. There are five partners at Sage, and I’m one of the five. Three of us have worked together for 25 years, and the other two for 13 and 15 years now. We have very good longevity at the partnership level. To me, that’s because people can be themselves and do good work. Our clients are interesting. M&A is very crazy, filled with unpredictability.

DLJ, when I was there, was a one-or-two-all-nighters-a-week culture. You could not make plans; you could not rely on plans. That’s probably softened a little, because banking is still hard work. I did the recruiting for Sage with one of my other partners, and it’s still not for the faint of heart. Our young people work hard. They don’t work those hours, but they work hard.

Stacy: I’ve always thought Sage was super cool, because it’s kind of my thing. A combination of finance, but you’re working on what I think are really interesting companies. Now it seems obvious to have that vertical focus in these lifestyle brands, but was it so obvious back then, or was it sort of a gamble?

Paul: [14:32] It wasn’t a gamble, but it wasn’t a plan either. We had deals we could put on our deal sheet from our prior firms, but when we got our first new deal as a new firm, it was for a denim brand called Earl Jean, a premium denim company. We sold it for $85 million to Nautica. It really started a wave of contemporary apparel M&A.

Then, the next deal: the two founders of Juicy Couture came to us and said, ” You sold Earl; would you sell Juicy? We want $86 million. We said, why 86? They said, it’s one more than 85. That’s how people sometimes still think about valuation. I’m better than you, or what have you.

We ended up selling that for $350 million. It’s had another couple of lives since, but we did well for our client. Then at some point we thought, you know what, we’re getting a lot of consumer interest, a lot of consumer prospects. Let’s lean into it. Let’s be known for it. So we started turning away tech, healthcare, and real estate. That was more nerve-racking in a way.

Stacy: That’s an interesting way to think about it.

Paul: Because we’re 100% in on consumer, that’s all we do. A lot of folks have left consumer, don’t believe in it, or get nervous about it. We’re gluttons for punishment, because we still think brands are being created and growth is being created, and the passion these entrepreneurs have is very different from other verticals.

I really like the counseling side of it. To me, it doesn’t even look like the traditional investment banking I saw 33 years ago. It’s very personal, very high stakes at human scale. I like that about it. I’ve never really had a good feel for public markets. I don’t think I could do public-company stuff as well. We’ve had public-company clients, but taking companies public just hasn’t been my thing.

Stacy: The consumer landscape has changed so much since you started, with the internet, D2C, and the ability to build brands. Can you talk about your experience with that evolution, and how the MBA maybe helped you navigate some of these shifts?

Paul: One thing I appreciated from my MBA was that you meet people with different skill sets from different chapters. In a way, I was never that surprised when things evolved, because we were kind of in the middle of it. For a while, the popular brands were the ones publicized in Us Weekly, sold at Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s, and discovered at Barneys. Barneys is no longer around, and I don’t know who reads Us Weekly. The marketing has changed completely.

Paul: [17:56] We’ve always had a core segment in apparel, and we’ve diversified in that area and beyond. But around 2011 or 2012, what I’d call the vintage Instagram era, there were really no barriers to entry for someone to create a brand. They could make an ad. Shopify was on the scene, or Magento before it. It wasn’t hard to build a brand if you had an idea around a product and some basic branding. But it was hard to build a great one. That’s always hard. It was easy to build a mediocre brand profitably for a while, because Instagram and others were subsidizing their platforms. People didn’t realize it. They thought they were smart, but later they realized they’d been lucky.

Stacy: Can you give an example of a brand like that?

Paul: One of my clients, and I think they were lucky, but lucky and good, I should say, was Pura Vida Bracelets. They make friendship bracelets. You may have seen this Costa Rica–based company. The two guys who started it were UCSD grads. They met two craftsmen in Costa Rica making those friendship bracelets, used their last $200 to buy as many as they could, and put them on a dish at a cash wrap. One of their moms had a store in Malibu. Then they started building a community around it. This was before influencers were a big thing. They just had a feel-good, beachy brand, and Instagram fed the beast, and they fed it. We ended up selling it for $130 million.

Stacy: Oh, I didn’t know this story. Wow.

Paul: They’re a favorite client of mine and have become a wonderful friend to me and to Sage. They’ve subsequently referred six or seven deals to me and to us. They had an idea, they were good marketers, and they had a good sense of product and merchandising, and the platform helped them. Subsequent to us selling it to Vera Bradley, it has not done well, and Vera Bradley just sold it recently, and this is public, for more of a fire-sale price, unfortunately. But at the time we sold the business, it was doubling every year and quite sizable. So they got a good deal. That’s an example of the shift.

Paul: [20:56] Then what happened was, at that point, investors were saying wholesale is a dirty word. We want you to sell everything direct. So you saw people building brands almost to prepare for the M&A event, rather than to build a product people wanted. But the market saw through that pretty quickly.

Brands were being created that were really product companies built by brute-force marketing, forcing people to click. It wasn’t the same as, well, how does that brand make you feel? What’s the emotional attachment? How do you feel when you put it on, or choose it, or buy it as a gift? You and I could be served completely different ads and not even know the same brands anymore.

With that monoculture gone, it became easier to start something, but it hasn’t been sustained. Once the math got tough on direct-to-consumer, and it’s gotten very tough for a segment of companies, because it’s too expensive to acquire new customers only through Meta, Facebook, and Instagram, the pendulum shifted a little back to people wanting a wholesale component.

There’s now an openness to Amazon. Buyers really want to see what brands are being smart about and how else they’re acquiring customers. I just did a deal last year for a really cool brand called Daily Drills. They have eight employees, but they know their customer extremely well, and we got a great deal done for them. It’s private.

Stacy: What is Daily Drills?

Paul: They’re an athleisure and loungewear company, started by two women who met on Instagram. They were 28 when we helped them with their deal. They sold to a strategic buyer and are continuing to grow the business. But they’re also influencers on the side. They don’t spend any money on digital marketing; they don’t accept returns, and they don’t have any production employees.

So we’re now spending time with companies that are rewriting every line of the P&L in some way to break through. If we were selling a healthcare company, we probably wouldn’t need that. But in consumer, you really need to be checking new boxes around innovative business models to pull people’s attention away from the risks. Does that make sense?

Stacy: So what are some of the innovative sectors or business models you’re excited about?

Paul: I’m definitely excited about content meeting commerce, content building community. I have a couple of clients now who’ve built their following first through content, through information, through entertainment.

Stacy: Is that kind of like a Goop type of thing?

Paul: Yeah, like a Goop type of thing. They don’t need to spend as much money on digital ads, so they can put that toward the bottom line or support their wholesale customers. I like those models where people are thinking a little differently. We’re also spending time in beauty, and in beauty in particular, TikTok Shop has had a role to play. It’s evolving; it’s been in the news, but we were representing a brand called One Size. I don’t know if you know it from Sephora. They have the top three SKUs at Sephora.

Stacy: I’m sure my daughters have heard of it.

Paul: On the e-com front, TikTok Shop was their big push first, and then they did their own digital marketing push and got a lift that way, because TikTok is very promotional, very single-unit driven. I’m getting into the weeds a little, but those are some of the things we’re interested in.

Stacy: [24:33] Okay, and going back to your MBA.

Paul: Yes, I forgot about that.

Stacy: So you’re evaluating deals, but you’re also a partner in this firm. That’s a lot of different skills. What skills did you draw on most early on, and has that shifted? What skills are you leveraging now?

Paul: I love that question. If I think back on my MBA, it’s openness around networking, demystifying it, building friendships that are good for business. I never really thought of it as a dirty word, but the MBA gives you the confidence to lean into networking. I still use that every day in my career.

Stacy: And not to view it in such a transactional way.

Paul: Right.

Stacy: It’s just relationships.

Paul: I have this conversation all the time. Sometimes people come to me, or we’ll have a networking meeting or a lunch, and they’ll say, well, what can I do for you? That’s just not how I approach things. I’d rather just meet people, and good things will happen. Probably less has happened than I’d hoped, but it’s still fun. Business school demystifies that. It also teaches you hustle, because you have to find the job, the internship, the whole application process.

Stacy: And you’re with peers who are hustling, intense, and focused.

Paul: I found a place to work that’s very collegial, and we really try to bring out the best in people. Michigan was filled with really nice people, and that was a fit for me. Like I said, I didn’t really apply anywhere else, so I don’t know what the other schools would have been like, but I loved my whole time there. It was super social, which I think has to help you with work.

Stacy: Which Paul likes.

Paul: Yeah, that’s true. But look, consumer M&A, or just advisory, is creative writing and creative thinking. Obviously we need technical rigor and sales negotiation, but there’s also psychoanalysis, hand-holding, crisis management, all of that.

Paul: [27:05] And the time management you learn in an MBA program helps. All the tool-chest stuff helps. It’s been a long time now. I graduated 26 years ago. It’s crazy. I’d be curious to hear what you hear from others, what really sticks with MBA students. But when people ask me about it, I just think there’s nothing better than investing in yourself. During that whole time, you know that’s what you’re doing.

Later you could say, I wish I’d done something else. But during that time, when you’ve made that decision, you’re really investing in yourself, and I think that’s wonderful. You don’t often get chances to do that once you start working. I wish I could go back to school now. I’d have so much fun.

Stacy: And it’s just what you make of it. How much are you focused on the classes, meeting the professors, talking to people after hours, embracing the extras? There’s more than you can take in.

Paul: I wish I’d gotten to know more of the international students.

Stacy: I had a conversation, I think last week, and they said the same. I’m trying to think which school it was.

Paul: What triggered it for me is that when I go back for reunions, I end up spending more time with them than with others. If you think about what brought them there, there are always interesting stories a little off the beaten path with international students. So I think that was a great thing.

I probably should take more advantage of some of the networking that continues to happen. Some schools do it more than others, and some alumni do it more than others. I could probably do a little more of that. But like I said, I’m still on a group chat with some business school friends, and I’ve sent work to classmates and vice versa.

Stacy: When we started this conversation, you said you recently connected with some classmates. That’s the thing. It’s not transactional; it’s just your network, and you use it for life and benefit from it and contribute to it.

Paul: Yes. And you’re judged, at least I believe, by your referrals. If I can refer someone I care about and know will do a good job, and I know they’re a good person, I’m already relaxed. I won’t be worried.

Stacy: [30:02] I’m trying to think what else I want to ask you. Okay, I’ll ask you some quick questions. Best part of your job, 24 years later, or whatever it is?

Paul: I haven’t had the same day twice.

Stacy: Love that.

Paul: It’s very true.

Stacy: One thing you’d tell your pre-MBA self about where your career would lead.

Paul: Even though you’d say I’m about consistency, I really think of myself as trying to seek newness and opportunity. So I’d tell myself, if you can find a framework to have consistency but also have newness within it, that’s probably a win.

Stacy: I’ll vouch for that. I certainly think you’re someone who wants to experience all things, so that tracks. What’s a fun consumer trend you’re excited about?

Paul: A lot of people are talking about this, but I think AI clienteling, AI consumer choice. I’m not sure how we’re going to plan for it yet, or how it’s going to affect our clients, but I’m talking to people about it all the time. Nowadays, if you give AI a list, like a menu, and ask it what to order, it’ll give you advice. If you give it a price list from a store, it’ll give you recommendations. Now brands are going to start influencing the AI.

Stacy: Oh, that’s interesting. So you could go to a store and say, I’m going to a wedding in the South, here’s the weather, recommend some things.

Paul: They’re already doing that. Ralph Lauren, by the way, has an AI bot that’s meant to act as if Ralph himself were giving you the advice.

Stacy: Is it in his voice?

Paul: I don’t know, but it’s supposed to have his taste level. One of my colleagues told me her mom will take a picture or video of her whole makeup routine, load it into Claude, and say, give me some recommendations, ways to short-circuit with brands at this price point, ones that are good value for the money. Then she’ll make choices based on what the AI recommends. So now brands are trying to figure out how to influence the AI engine, what keywords they can put in their materials. In some ways it’s very scary, and in some ways it’s interesting.

Stacy: Yeah, AI is scary and super interesting and exciting. I’m thinking Sephora could go in and help you put together your makeup routine.

Paul: Yeah. One of my clients has his AI, I’m not sure which one he uses, review his emails and their whole company system, and then give him a management roadmap each Monday morning. Here are the issues that have percolated through email, through yours and others’. Here are the things we need to manage, here’s what you need to help with, here are some long-term strategies. Something that would take a chief of staff two weeks to worry about gets pretty close in 30 seconds.

Stacy: Amazing. I’m sure the decks and business plans you’re seeing are uber-polished these days.

Paul: [33:16] That’s the other thing. We put together beautiful decks and books at Sage, and it’s always been a bit of a hallmark of ours. We want them to drip with the brand, we want buyers to be excited about that intangible. They’re labors of love. And then I’ll talk to private equity funds, and the first thing they do now is feed it to an AI to give them the easy questions and the hard questions to ask the entrepreneur and the banker. It’ll point out all the trends in the model, which, by the way, is how we all learned.

So I don’t know what happens to learning. And this investor was telling me they know some bankers who are using AI to create the book. So the computers, you’re just talking to computers. I don’t even know what we’re doing here.

Stacy: I know. Well, at least we’re talking.

Paul: Exactly.

Stacy: Okay, well, thank you.

Paul: I hope this was useful to your listenership.

Stacy: I think it will be. And I appreciate you taking the time.

Paul: You did a nice job. You’re easy to talk to.

Stacy: I always like hearing what you’re working on. It’s always cool companies and interesting transactions.

Paul: Yes. You don’t hear all the negative stuff, but we could also have a conversation about all that.

Stacy: Part two.

Paul: Part two. What they didn’t tell you about the deal world.

Stacy: Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you, Paul.

Paul: Sure. I hope this was great. Thank you for inviting me on your podcast.