Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Private Equity at a Crossroads: Trends, Valuations & What’s Next with Matt Wolf of Elliott Davis 4-29-25
Tue, 29 Apr 2025
In this episode, Matt Wolf, Valuation Leader and Healthcare Senior Analyst at Elliott Davis, joins Scott Becker to break down current private equity trends, shifting investor behavior, and how dealmaking is evolving in a high-rate environment.
Who are the speakers and what is Elliott Davis?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. We're thrilled today to visit with one of our most listened to guests. We're joined by senior market analyst, valuation analyst, and brilliant person, Matt Wolf. Matt is at a firm called Elliott Davis, a terrific firm.
He's going to tell us a little bit about Elliott Davis, and then he'll tell us what he sees with trends with M&A. Is it almost ready to bounce back? What's he expecting and what's he seeing? Matt, can you take a moment, tell us about yourself, tell us about Elliott Davis, and then let's talk about what you're seeing and what's going on.
Yeah, happy to, Scott, thanks. I guess quick background on myself, spent nearly 20 years in sort of the valuation, private equity deal space at Elliott Davis, which is a firm sort of based in the Southeast, serving clients nationally, again, very focused on middle market,
deals, audit, tax, consulting, advisory, and heavily leaning into industry and technology-based approaches to solving our clients' problems. So exciting firm, exciting time to be an advisor to these, to middle market deals nationally, globally. And it's just been a wild ride the past few months or so, as I'm sure all your listeners can also attest to. And
What I've been really looking at lately, Scott, is just some of the changes to allocation ideology from limited partners and other sort of institutional investors. We've seen a pullback from public equities into high-yield credits, into gold, of all things, as people try to navigate this sort of changing geopolitical, changing macroeconomic
regime, I guess, for lack of a better word, and more specific to private equity. We saw big news a few days, maybe a week ago now, of Yale selling up as much as $6 billion of its private equity holdings. We've seen this convergence in returns between, at least historically now, between private equity returns and public equity returns.
And just thinking about what does that mean going forward, not only for
institutional investors and limited partners allocation to private equity but what does that mean for the the actual sponsors and how to think about deals how to how to go for how to source deals execute deals what does that mean for hold periods as um you know the the sort of global financial system works through this regime change and and a lot of investors take a you know another look at private equity and talk about that because there's there's
multiple different types of investors in private equity there's obviously the big institutions such that you're talking about um like yale like the pension funds that have made private equity a core part of their portfolio over the years and then you've got sort of what i would call moderate to higher worth that high net worth individuals that increasingly over the last bunch of years made pe and vc part of their portfolios and
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