How Melanie Brensinger Built A1A Investment Partners Through Small-Town Values and Healthcare Innovation

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is Melanie Brenziger, founder and CEO of A1A Investment Partners, a healthcare-focused private credit investment firm. They specialize in providing flexible capital solutions to lower middle market healthcare companies.

helping them grow and innovate in an ever-changing industry. Melanie has over two decades of experience in healthcare investing. She is sought after as an expert healthcare investor speaking at conferences and engagements around the country. She has deployed nearly $4 billion of capital with no realized losses and has sourced over 1,000 healthcare investment opportunities. She spent nine years at GE Capital on the healthcare team and successfully deployed over $3 billion of capital.

She departed GE in 2015 to begin her entrepreneur journey and has since founded and managed two healthcare focused private investment firms with capital of over 300 million. Melanie currently serves on the boards of various A1A and antigenesis portfolio companies. In addition, she is a former board member of the SBIA Board of Governors, co-founder of Women’s Investment Network Council, WINC.

As a recipient of the Gerard L. Philippe Award from GE, Melanie stands out for her commitment to community and volunteer service. She founded the Pitt Foundation, a nonprofit entity providing education to children in Kenya. Melanie is also an advisory member for 51 Vets, a community that fosters impactful relationships between elite veterans and finance leaders. She is passionate about advocating for animal rights and rescuing shelter dogs.

Before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications. And here’s the fun part. The program actually puts more money in your employees’ pockets and the company’s too.

One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, founder and managing partner of A1A Investment Partners, Melanie Brenzinger. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Melanie Brensinger (02:45)
Thank you, Anthony, and I’m going to have to talk to you about that benefits program. That actually sounds quite interesting.

Anthony Codispoti (02:51)
Well, make sure that we get to that at some point. So Melanie, you were a generalist in the early part of your career and then niched down into the healthcare sector when joining GE. Why did you decide to be industry specific and why specifically healthcare?

Melanie Brensinger (02:52)
Hahaha

Yeah, thanks, Anthony. In the early part of my career, I was a generalist, as you mentioned. I was ⁓ working with private equity firms, doing everything from pasta making businesses to motor trucks and fiber optics and all sorts of things across the industries. I had done some healthcare, but never really focused on healthcare. And when I was recruited by GE in 2006 ⁓ for the healthcare team, I really wasn’t sure how I thought about

being industry focused at the time, I was a bit naive believing that if I leashed down into healthcare, it would limit my opportunities within my career. And also that it might be ⁓ too restrictive in terms of opportunities. And what I found was the healthcare industry is just the opposite of that. I did like at the time that healthcare felt to me like it was giving back to community versus extracting from the earth and the broader community.

versus for example, oil and gas or other ⁓ industries that are out there. So I felt really good about healthcare and I felt like it was a place where I could ⁓ make an impact. I had seen the disparities of healthcare across the board growing up. And so I was really interested in niching down and GE and the healthcare team was a great place to go and build out that expertise.

Anthony Codispoti (04:29)
Can you say more about what it was that you saw growing up in the disparity of healthcare access?

Melanie Brensinger (04:35)
Yeah, Anthony. So as we had talked about, I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, ⁓ not an Amish country, but close enough to Amish country. And, ⁓ you know, I saw that we had one primary physician that we had gone to, you know, he recently retired, frankly, so he was kind of the go-to primary physician in our town. We had one dentist to go to and, you know, if you wanted any type of more advanced care, you had to drive, you know, whether it be an hour or almost two hours to

to get to good quality healthcare. And now that I’m in the industry and I see it, and I’m an adult, of course, frankly looking out, I think a lot of people think about rural healthcare and underserved markets being really rural areas and kind of across the Midwest and central United States. But you don’t have to go too far outside of any urban industry and any urban markets to really see a big difference in healthcare, not only in access.

but also in quality of care. And I’m just a firm believer that everybody in the US should have the same rights to access the quality of care despite where they live. And we can talk about that a little bit more as we think about where A1A is spending time investing in areas of focus for us.

Anthony Codispoti (05:50)
Yeah, we’re gonna get to A1A here in a minute, but I wanna hear a little bit more about your time at GE and how those experiences helped to shape your understanding of the broader healthcare industry.

Melanie Brensinger (06:01)
Yes, so when I joined GE, I joined in 2006 and I was really recruited to GE to bring my relationships that I had with private equity firms. The healthcare team was just starting to get built out and really wanted to focus on investing alongside of really quality private equity firms. During that time, I was there from 2006 to 2015 and I deployed about $3 billion of capital for them across 48 companies and

don’t have any realized losses as part of my track record, but during that time, he was… ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (06:32)
Time out. Sorry. That

one is just so impressive. ⁓ I hate to interrupt mid thought, how is that possible? You deployed $3 billion with no realized losses.

Melanie Brensinger (06:38)
No problem. No problem.

Yeah, and in fact, ⁓ I it’s a bit higher now just given the last investments I’ve been doing since ⁓ since leaving GE. But I would say that ⁓ what I’ve learned over time is that I have no tolerance for capital losses. So I feel like I have a tremendous responsibility of fiduciary ⁓ responsibility for investors, not only when I was a GE, but now running my own firm.

And ⁓ I look at all investments through ideally downside protection and capital preservation. And I think that a lot of times in private credit, people think, well, you’re a senior lender, know, worst case scenario, you’ll be able to get out of an investment. And what I’ve learned over a lot of workouts and a lot of trials and tribulations that when you go into an investment, you have to think about downside protection and not only the simple.

things of covenant packages and whatnot, but what could possibly happen? And I think, certainly I couldn’t predict the OA crisis, I couldn’t predict COVID happening, or Affordable Care Act being implemented, or changes in administrations and regulatory changes. what I really learned from being at GE, although we were a senior lender, our underwriting standards were so high.

that it was as if we were underwriting the last dollar of common equity. And they really had no tolerance for principal loss. And so it really taught me how to underwrite in a really strong way to make sure that if all things went sideways, that you had a pretty good chance of at least getting your principal back. I really got to learn and experience that at GE. And then I took that forward to now investing.

private capital for individual and institutional investors and my whole team and I think about it that way even today.

Anthony Codispoti (08:38)
So part of it, obviously you want to put your money in the right places, but you can’t predict everything, right? Nobody has a crystal ball. So in the event that this deal does not work out, how can we have it set up so that there are ways for us to at least get our cash back, right?

Melanie Brensinger (08:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That’s exactly right. And Anthony, one of the things that I’ve learned again for a lot of workout experience is that if you’re investing, and we’ll talk a little bit more about this, if you’re invested in private credit and people think, again, ⁓ I’m a senior debt lender, so in a worst case scenario, I’ll take over the company as in air quotes, or if the company goes bankrupt, I’ll be in a really secure position because I have a first lien ⁓ senior debt position. And I think on the…

kind of optically and on the surface, all of that is true. The difference is if things go sideways for a company, whether it be bad governance, ⁓ poor management, changes in the industry, COVID supply chain issues, all these different things that can happen to bring you to a workout moment where the people in charge, whether it’s management or private equity firm can’t pay their debt back.

There is a long series of things that need to happen before a senior lender can actually come in and secure and protect their original principal investment. And I think what I’ve learned over the years is just being a senior lender with simple covenants and financial statement reporting does not protect your capital. What you really have to do is think about what are the governance protections in a downside scenario.

you don’t want to sit there as a senior lender and, you know, tick your fingers on your desk and wait for them to have a payment default, which is really when you can act in a very ⁓ specific way to try to get your principal back. So for all of our investments today, we make debt and equity investments alongside of our debt. And ironically enough, sometimes our debt is protecting our equity, but also sometimes our equity actually protects our debt.

Because if you don’t sit on the board, if you don’t control the board, if you don’t ⁓ have the ability to change out management in a downside scenario, or sitting there as a senior lender, you’re just stuck until you can take action. And most people as senior lenders also don’t have the operational skill set to actually take over a company. So the other thing that we do is we have operational folks around us, including a partner that’s with me at A1A.

that has an operational experience mindset that if we have to, we can drop him in as a CEO or come with that operational experience. it’s not just trying to sit around and predict what could happen and how do we underwrite to it, but you have to play out a few scenarios of if this happens, what can we do? And how much room do we have before we really have a problem? And covenants just don’t do it. Covenants are a look back, they’re not look forward.

And lastly, would say, Anthony, one thing we do for all of our investments, which is very unique in the senior debt world, is we require 13-week cash flows. Most people do not require forward-looking 13-week cash flows until they’re in a workout situation. Then they tell the company, hey, we have to check your cash for the next 13 weeks, give us a 13-week cash flow. From our perspective and from my experience, companies get in trouble because they run out of money, not because their EBITDA goes down or they miss a covenant.

You know, people can push back, our borrowers can push back and say, you know, why are we doing 13 week cash flows? It’s very unusual on the market. They should be doing it anyway to make sure that their liquidity is strong and their liquidity is right. And so we feel it’s just appropriate to do that upfront. And it’s really helped us get ahead of some really tough conversations and liquidity challenges way before it actually happens.

Anthony Codispoti (12:29)
So what’s the magic about the 13 weeks?

Melanie Brensinger (12:33)
So the 13 weeks, it’s just kind of an industry standard of how far out can you reasonably predict your cash. ⁓ know, most companies can see, you know, some have contracts, some don’t, but most companies have a pretty good indicator of kind of that 12 to 13 week period. usually includes enough payroll cycles and enough payment of their bills that you can, you don’t want to do that just for one cycle. You kind of want to have, you know, ⁓

few months there to say like, am I seeing? then also, you want to make sure if there is a liquidity crunch, do you have enough time to respond and either find a way to get that liquidity or, or, you know, come up with another solution about how the company is going to pay their bills. The worst case scenario is you get that call on a Friday afternoon and a company says we can’t make payroll. And unfortunately, that can happen. And when that happens, you know, what are you going to do?

and most traditional senior only lenders, ⁓ that’s an aha moment for them and that’s where they end up losing principle because they don’t have the answers to that question when that problem presents itself.

Anthony Codispoti (13:41)
So if I’m understanding what you were saying just a moment ago correctly, the fact that you’re taking both an equity stake as well as ⁓ putting some debt in place with your portfolio company, one of those is helping to support your strength and the other. But I’m not exactly clear how. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Melanie Brensinger (14:04)
Yeah, so we’re and they first and foremost were a private credit fund. So we lead with our debt products So we wouldn’t do equity without doing debt again back to the point of capital preservation. So as we think about Delivering our strategy to our investors and delivering our expected returns to our investors Our main focus is again work. We don’t want to lose your principal. So we start out by saying

let’s do a debt position. What does this look like? What differentiates us a bit in the market is that we’re focused on lower middle market. So that means companies traditionally have less than 15 million to be the doc. So we look at healthcare companies in that space, we don’t take any FDA risks. So we’re not doing any like preclinical trial risk for pharma or med devices will do pharma and med device deals, but only if they’ve been approved by the FDA. So first and foremost, we look

go to the company and say, what do you need? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to grow your business? Do you want to do acquisitions? What is happening that’s bringing us to this conversation? Do you need a refi debt? What is it? And a lot of times, the first challenge is that everyone has their boxes. All lenders traditionally have their boxes. Investors have their boxes. And they try to get companies to fit within their box. Well, if you have a company with less than $15 million, it’d be the doc.

That company doesn’t want to go to a bank for a working capital line, somebody like us to do a term loan, a mezzanine lender to do junior debt, an equity holder to do equity. Most of these companies have never even had institutional capital around them. That’s too overwhelming for their infrastructure. So we come to them and say, what do you need? And let us provide a flexible solution that works for you. And typically, again, that’s going to include debt and equity.

And so we look at the debt and say, want to be senior debt. We want to control the debt position. We want to have, again, a lot of covenants, a lot of financial statement reporting, and we’re sitting at the top of the capital structure. We’re typically priced at call it 14 to 16 % interest. And our leverage is usually around three times. So we don’t over lever the businesses, which is the first key point. We don’t over lever the business.

Anthony Codispoti (16:13)
Explain that for the layperson 14 to 16 % interest and then leveraged at 3x.

Melanie Brensinger (16:19)
Yeah, so on the interest, so 14 to 16 percent, Anthony, if you think, you know, if you have $100 and you put it in the bank, you’re maybe getting a point, right? You might be getting 1 percent if you’re lucky, right? In today’s environment, despite where interest rates are. So if you think about if you’re an investor with us, for example, let’s put your investor hat on for a moment. For our investors, our strategy is really attractive because our debt positions are kicking off.

14 to 16 % interest every quarter back to our investors. So if you think about, you put that same $100 with us in our fund, look at the return that you’re getting. That’s just on the deck. So for our companies, think about it. If you go to the bank and get a loan, you would pay us 14 to 16 % to get a loan for us. So you might say like, wow, that’s a lot of, it’s a high price loan for a company.

And it’s true. We’re not the cheapest people on the street, but we also add a lot of value. So I always tell people because we are industry focused and we are a true partner, we remove the commodity discussion around our cash. So if only if a borrower and a company ⁓ appreciates the partnership we bring to the table and values and wants that, does it make sense for them to pay that incremental amount? If they’re just looking for cheap debt, that’s not us.

So our debt is attractive for our investors from a return perspective, which obviously there are clients first and foremost. And then to the borrowers, we want to make sure that we can charge that money for our investors, but also that we’re delivering and we’re not just charging a bunch of money without creating value. So when we’re looking at partnering with a company, we need to make sure, okay, do they appreciate what we’re bringing to the table? And we can talk about that.

And also for that they’re gonna have to pay us. We’re not gonna give them a ⁓ Bentley and in charge, I don’t even know, Kia pricing or something. So we ⁓ preach what we deliver and we expect to get paid for it. So ⁓ that’s the debt position. And we do an equity piece alongside of the debt position. And the equity position is ⁓ preferred debt, meaning that we sit

really high in the equity structure so that if things do go sideways, we’re the first equity that will get paid ⁓ in a downside scenario. And typically that equity position, we will have a board seat. Sometimes we have more than ⁓ one board seat. ⁓ If we’re not controlling the company out of the gate, whoever is controlling the company, we say, listen, you can control the business. But if you’re EVADA, which is kind of the metric of how, ⁓ you know,

companies are measured from an earnings perspective. If your EBITDA drops below a certain amount, we actually take a springing control right of your board. So you can go run your business, but if you muck this up, we’re gonna take control of the board. So that again, back to some of my earlier points, we can replace management, we can make sure that the value doesn’t continue to decline over time, make whatever changes we need to protect our capital position. So in that scenario,

that board’s bringing board right, for example, that will actually protect our debt, ironically enough, and also protect our equity because once we can get control of the board, we might be able, if we need to, to make changes in management, we might be able to stop acquisitions from happening. We might be able to do cost controls or bringing other people in. If you don’t have control of the board, you can’t, as a senior lender, make those changes.

you have to go to the board and say, we want you to make these changes, but ultimately they make those decisions. So that’s why I’m saying sometimes if we were only in the debt, we couldn’t get that spring in control of the board. And a lot of people think when you’ve got the spring in control of the board, you’re protecting your equity, but at the end of the day, that also protects the senior lender because you’re stopping the bleed and you’re stopping cash from going out of the company, which preserves the cash to be able to repay the debt.

And I should mention you asked about leverage. So in the typical world of private credit, ⁓ you know, think about when you get a mortgage, for example, the bank will give you 80 % of the value of your home, you have to come up with 20%. So leverage in private credit is very much the same. If a company is worth six times even off, for example, how much debt do you want to put on the business? And how much equity do you want to have behind your debt to show alignment from a

you know, whoever owns the company’s perspective. But also, if you think about when you’re levering up for mortgage, for example, people ask you, what’s your cash flows? How much do you make every month? And how much, know, what are your bills? And it’s the same way with companies. For us, we look at how much does a company generate in cash flow? And then also, once we layer on our debt, how much debt can they actually support that they don’t feel like their cash flows are constrained? Again, back to the point of.

We want them to be able to service their debt and not have a liquidity issue.

Anthony Codispoti (21:32)
And so what is that 3X number referred to specifically?

Melanie Brensinger (21:34)
So three, yeah,

three X’s, for example, so they have 10 million of EBITDA and EBITDA is essentially in layman’s terms, how much money they have. So net income and other people’s terms, but EBITDA is essentially the earnings before interest, appreciation and amortization. That’s where the ITDA comes from EBITDA. So that’s what it’s earnings before interest, appreciation, amortization. So it’s trying to get a true kind of earnings line and saying,

how much debt do we want to put against us? So three times mean if you have a 10 million EBITDA business, you’d give them 30 million of debt. And that’s where the three times come from. And typically what happens in the market and why like in the 08 crisis happened and many other crises before that, if you’ve heard about leverage lending guidelines and too big to fail of banks and highly leveraged transactions, what would happen is people were pushing leverage very high. When I came,

into the industry in early 2000s, we were doing deals that had like eight or nine times leverage, sometimes 10 times leverage for these companies, which is just insanity when I think about it. But those were in the heydays of leverage lending really starting out. ⁓ And, and there wasn’t enough trouble that had happened as a result of that. Now we’ve gone through many cycles to understand why that’s not responsible to lever companies that way.

So three times leverage is a very modest leverage for these companies and a lot of times people will also stretch their leverage meaning increased leverage because when you increase the leverage arguably you should charge more because you’re taking more risk. But what we’re able to do is we’re able to keep the leverage at a modest level, keep our pricing where our investors want and what we tell our investors we want to deliver. But then

that incremental ⁓ value that we’re creating along the way in partnership with the companies is how we’re getting that incremental spread, not by taking incremental risks.

Anthony Codispoti (23:33)
Gotcha. Now, as I understand it, A1A Investment Partners was not your first entrepreneurial effort. Tell me about that first experience.

Melanie Brensinger (23:39)
Correct.

Yeah, so I was a GE, as I mentioned, for nine years. I was there during the OE crisis. I was there when the Affordable Care Act, now Obamacare, was put in place. In the OE crisis, if you remember, GE almost went bust. They actually ended up having to take money from Warren Buffett because their funding was really connected to the commercial paper market, which went sideways in the OE crisis. so the boxes in which people could invest kept

⁓ getting restricted and then also people kept moving up markets. So the lending environment changed a lot after OE. And although private credit was around in OE, it really exploded after the OE crisis because the banks became highly regulated. And this was a way for people to raise capital and be able to invest in the credit world. And when I think about where private credit is today relative to then, billions and billions of dollars have been raised around private credit.

But for our industry, I saw an opportunity in the market, I said, gosh, there’s no one else out there focused in on healthcare for private credit. People were doing healthcare within large private credit platforms, but I didn’t know anyone out there that was 100 % focused on healthcare and then focused in again on lower middle market, less than 15, who could say to borrowers, let me help you find a solution that works for you versus you fitting in my box.

And that was really my thesis. said, you know, if I leave GE, I think this is what I want to do. I see a gap in the market. Someone out there must be doing it. So I started to ask around, does anybody know a private credit fund focused on healthcare? yeah, sure, sure. And they would name like a venture fund or equity fund or all these different things. But nobody was doing private credit healthcare.

Anthony Codispoti (25:32)
And private

credit specifically is just lending money directly, like without a bank.

Melanie Brensinger (25:36)
Exactly.

Exactly. So so what gets confusing, like, it should really be called private debt, frankly, when it’s really private credit. But if you think about the broader world of investing, you have private equity, which is pretty obvious, you know, that’s like, private equity firms are raising big pools of capital to put equity in their companies. Traditionally, like early in my career, when private equity firms were making investments in businesses, they would put in equity and they go to a bank.

and get the money to support that acquisition or transaction or takeover of the company. then companies would go to banks to get lending like all of us do, right? But with private credit exploding, it’s essentially like going to a bank without going to a bank. So the funds are set up just like traditional private equity funds, but the money is going to debt investments versus equity investments. And again, we’re hybrid. We do debt and equity, but

Traditional private credit just means you’re lending money just like you would a bank, but you don’t you’re regulated with SEC. You’re not regulated by the bank regulating authorities. So, ⁓ you know, one of the I think broader risks for private credit is that you don’t have the regulatory controls from banking perspective that banks have. so private credit has a tremendous amount of flexibility of what you can do with a private credit fund again, according to SEC standards, but the actual

way in which you lend money and the way you structure deals are all up to you versus having the bank regulatory authorities tell you if you’re doing too risky of lending. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (27:14)
Gotcha.

So you found that there wasn’t anybody doing private credit to the health care industry in this lower middle market sub $15 million EBITDA. So you’re like, I sort of found a niche here.

Melanie Brensinger (27:23)
Correct.

Exactly. And you know, my, ⁓ family ⁓ has some entrepreneurial spirit to it. ⁓ My, ⁓ my dad owned a landscaping business and tree trimming business. ⁓ In addition to his, his regular employment, he, he owned that company. My brother left Siemens at a very young age and started his own healthcare business. And so

⁓ You know I saw in within my own family a lot of success to leave quote-unquote the security of a paycheck to go do something different but it was terrifying and ⁓ You know, I didn’t know I knew what I knew and I knew what I didn’t know and I thought like is this possible Can I do this? You know, I had been working my entire life, ⁓ you know collecting a check if you will and being an employee and I thought like

How can I do this? I have enough guts to be able to do this? And this is where I would say Anthony ignorance is bliss. I think how do I know? Oh, no, I would have been so scared that I would never have taken the jump. And, know, the glamorous part about being an entrepreneur is sometimes what is always shown.

Anthony Codispoti (28:27)
So many entrepreneurs have this story. If I had known what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it.

Melanie Brensinger (28:45)
but it’s those client moments and those dips, know, there’s books written on dips. Those dips are brutal when you’re an entrepreneur. And so to pull the rip cord, and I had a very successful career, G, as I mentioned, you know, I was a top performer there. I was making very good money and my career was going in a great direction. And so to pull the rip cord and say, go to nothing, and you know, back then they still had Blackbird.

bit blackberries. I don’t know if you remember that Anthony where the little red light would go off on your blackberry. And I thought like, man, who’s going to call me my blackberry if I quit my job. I, I just looked around and I said, I really know healthcare at this point, I feel really confident that I’m an expert within the industry. I knew that I could originate deals. ⁓ Like, you know, no one else on the street. It’s one of my strongest strengths. I knew I had really good underwriting skills.

At that time, I’d already founded the Pitt Foundation. So I did a lot of fundraising in the nonprofit side of the world. And I knew I was gritty enough and scrappy enough and humble enough that if I didn’t know something, I would find somebody who knew and be comfortable enough to say like, I don’t know, can you come help me? So I knew those are strengths I had, but I knew I never founded an investment firm. I knew I didn’t have institutional.

investor relationships, I knew I hadn’t fundraised. Yeah, exactly. You know, I hadn’t fundraised before. And I think this is broad statement. And I don’t think it’s controversial. But in general, I think that women are a little bit more adverse in terms of risk taking or feeling like we have to like, check every single box before we move. And again, this is general is

Anthony Codispoti (30:10)
And that’s a big gap, right? Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (30:35)
general statement, but and I’ve seen this even in hiring men and women. ⁓ And so for me, I was like, gosh, I don’t know all these things. Maybe I need to find learn all these things before I can do this or, you know, and I was really in my head about this. And then ⁓ I had met somebody along the way I didn’t deal with and ⁓ he had suggested at the time that he had those skill sets to bring to the table. And so I thought,

you know, this could be a great combination. He brings the things that I don’t have and I know what I bring to the table. Let’s go out and do this together. So we partnered up in 2015. It took us three years to raise the pool of capital, but we were able to close on a $274 million fund, which was very successful, again, lower middle market healthcare, flexible solutions. And so that really started my journey.

We had made a decision in raising the next fund that we were not going to raise another pool of capital together. So A1A was kind of born out of that experience. And we can talk about that a little bit more. But A1A, I’m a sole GP, meaning I run and manage A1A myself. And over time, plan to make some changes and bring in and further develop my team and the partner level. But right now, I’m 100 % owner. And I’ve learned so much about

about business building and entrepreneurship through that transition as well.

Anthony Codispoti (32:06)
It sounds like there’s probably more to the story there. You’d raised hundreds of millions of dollars, very successful right out of the gate, you the first fund that the two of you have done together. And then I feel like we almost kind of yada yada yada because like, why why not continue?

Melanie Brensinger (32:20)
Yeah, I would say that Anthony and this is ⁓ I think when and I mentor a lot of people and talk to a lot of people who are wanting to leave and go found their own firm and you know a lot I know of another firm that has four partners and they kind of work together and are friends and they’re like this can be amazing we’re gonna go raise a fund I’m like well what if it’s not right what if you hit the dip and you’re not making money

you’re having to fund a business, somebody goes through a divorce, somebody has another kid that they weren’t expecting or the wife puts her job or, know, and I say wife because these are all happening to me, men like what happened or you get in a big fight or you think somebody handles stress one way and they handle stress a different way or you think that somebody moves in the world one way and then under stress they move completely different. What are you going to do?

Right? How are you going to navigate the breakup? And when you have a two person partnership, if you’re not clear about those things day one, and then also you don’t have things documented in a way that allow for, again, just like underwriting in a deal. Like I was so clear, Anthony, about that downside protection on the investments I made and protecting my investors capital.

I had never translated hindsight’s always 2020. But in setting up a partnership, you have to have the same mindset of what ifs. And it’s not just you’re bringing this, I’m bringing this, you have a track record, I have a track record, let’s go do this. Everything’s going to be perfect. You have to really look at that other person or people and say, do they align with how they again, move in the world more broadly? Do they align with how they think about things? Do they align?

with how they treat people. When they’re under stress, what do they do? Do they lean in negatively? Do they lean in positively? How do they navigate that? And then if they pick up bad habits along the way, how are you gonna address it? And in an Armageddon scenario, how are you gonna separate? I mean, think about, it’s almost like a business divorce in many cases. And so, you know, now coming through this other side,

Anthony Codispoti (34:37)
so.

Melanie Brensinger (34:42)
When I’m working, and I would say for your audience, if you’re thinking about creating a partnership, thinking about creating a business with somebody, you have to have these tough conversations. If I think about my brother and his business partners have been now together about 18 years, they have the best partnership I have ever experienced across my entire business ⁓ world. And not just because it’s my brother and his partner, but because

they always have each other’s backs. When if you’re with one of them and you say like jokingly, who’s the boss? They always say the other person’s the boss. They have had had to go through ebbs and flows with one another. And they’re always aligned. You know, they were looking at selling their business a couple years ago, and one wanted to sell one didn’t want to sell. And they both talked to me separately saying like, gosh, I really want to sell. But if he doesn’t sell, like I’m not going to sell like or you know, and they

So they always stuck together. There was no plan B, there was no other option, it wasn’t always perfect, right? But they always said, you know, this is our guiding light, and they’re very similar type of people, meaning they have boundaries and borders in life in which they won’t cross. And I think that when you partner with somebody, those are the things that get missed early. People focus on the, again, like, can you do this? I can’t do that. Do you have a track record? Do you have the money to do it?

How are we going to do it? And you get focused on strategy versus like who are you as a human being?

Anthony Codispoti (36:07)
So.

Yeah, so let me ask you like one like key clause or one key condition that you would recommend anybody going into a new partnership like make sure that you do this thing. Make sure you have this set up.

Melanie Brensinger (36:22)
Yeah, yeah,

you have to have in your documents a way to either remove the other person or buy out the other person. And that could either be because of a disagreement or even something simple, Anthony, like on death. So for example, say you’re with a partner and your partner dies, guess what? Next thing you know, that person’s husband or wife is going to be your new partner to control the company, right?

Most times that’s probably not the wisest thing to do. Exactly. And that happens. An operating partner of ours, ironically enough, neighbor ended up dying in a plane crash. And this company had no succession planning in their documents, nothing. This wife, his wife ended up running like a huge company because he passed and so it goes to the estate and she controlled the estate.

Anthony Codispoti (36:53)
They don’t have the same skill sets, the same personality, they don’t have an understanding of the business, sure.

Melanie Brensinger (37:18)
You can imagine for investors in that company, like, holy cow, what is happening? Like, not anything negative to her, but you know, she was a stay at home mom, and now she’s the CEO of this massive company. So I think making sure you stay in the documents, what if, what if, and you don’t have to guess what it is, what if the partnership needs to dismantle? What are we going to do? What are the steps that we have in place upon death?

your economic interests can still remain with your partner, but the controlling of the business has to revert to the other partner so that again, you are making sure that you are the one, if you’re the one remaining, that you’re controlling the company and therefore protecting your investors.

Anthony Codispoti (38:02)
So I’m gathering that with your prior partner, ⁓ you guys just sort of going through the business together, you figured out that you’re sort of not aligned in terms of either values or personality. And so how painful was sort of the unwinding of that arrangement?

Melanie Brensinger (38:19)
It was ⁓ the most brutal experience, Anthony, of my entire career, ⁓ mainly because my guiding light through everything was people look, I look people in the eye and they look me in the eye and they trusted me with their capital. And I take that very, very seriously to the point where I told you I’ve had no realized losses. I can’t imagine someone trusting me with their capital and me losing money for them.

So my guiding light was every single day, am I doing the best I could possibly do for these investors? They gave me their money. Am I waking up every day and deploying it correctly, deploying it responsibly, managing it responsibly, and in a downside scenario, protecting it with all my ability to do so to that last dollar is recouped from them. And through this experience, that was my guiding light to say, this is a difficult situation.

difficult decisions need to be made, but am I putting the investors first? And in putting the investors first, I had to put my own economic interests and my own frankly well-being on the sidelines because those two things unfortunately couldn’t exist at a period of time together. But through that experience, I’ve learned that so many other folks out there haven’t ever had fiduciary responsibility tested. ⁓

And I think the fact that it was tested for me, arguably early in my career in many ways, I’m so clear about this, doing this now for A1A and so clear about what it means to hold fiduciary responsibility in high regard. And I teach this to my team every day, all the time we talk, we have to put their interests first. And I think it’s made me frankly, a much better investor. Anthony, what investors have told me is that

They know they can trust me. They know that I’m gonna be transparent with them. They know that I can have crucial, difficult conversations, and at the end of the day, I’m gonna be honest with them. And so many times, investors are looking for that. They’re not looking for the shiny track record. They’re not looking for the perfect answers. They wanna know, can they go to bed at night trusting you with their money? And a lot of times, that’s not tested.

And so I feel in an ironic sort of way that this experience has reshaped me to be an even better investor ⁓ for my underlying investors. And I feel like I have a lot of conviction around what that means every day with how we do what we do.

Anthony Codispoti (41:04)
You know, earlier in the interview, you talked about growing up in a small town and that gave you sort of a window into different levels of access that folks have into healthcare. I also wonder now hearing you talk about these strong core values that you have, if that’s been in any way influenced by that same kind of small town upbringing.

Melanie Brensinger (41:25)
Yeah, absolutely. Anthony, like my parents, you we, you know, my brother and I both played sports our entire life, but we always had dinner every single night at the dinner table. Even if it was very late by the time we got home from our sports activities or our games or whatever it was, we had dinner every single night. Both my parents work by the way. You know, we had dinner every single night on Sunday evenings. My parents would sit at the kitchen table and balance their checkbook. You know, my, my

Dad used to talk about, ⁓ he would get so annoyed if he’d lend out a piece of his equipment and people would return it not cleaned and the gas tank wasn’t filled. He’s like, you should return something better than you received it. He always thought really strongly about ⁓ paying for things and not having handouts and if somebody did something for you, really appreciating that. And my mom is such a caring, ⁓

and beautiful person that I think her compassion and empathy and understanding kind of comes through with a lot of the philanthropic work that I do. And, my brother, if arguably my brother and I have been wildly successful relative to where we came from, you know, my graduating class had less than a hundred people in my high school. So it’s very small school. But I think ironically enough, Anthony, that town I grew up in was a farmer town. My parents aren’t farmers, but

I think that farmer mentality of getting up every day and towing the soil and creating something out of nothing and the hard work it takes from making a seed to a plant to food, ⁓ there’s something about that discipline and that rigor and tenacity, I think that was around me all of the time. ⁓

And it comes through and I think about, my brother and I both do this, but I’ve seen my brother do this. My brother hand writes thank you cards. My brother, ⁓ you know, is so giving and careful to do those same sort of things of really honoring what somebody does and like taking what people do in high regard back to you and taking ⁓ it seriously when somebody trusts you and, you know, not wanting to disappoint somebody when somebody is relying on you. Some of those things.

And he’s incredibly tenacious too, both he and I are that same way. So I think there is something to that, Anthony. And I think on the value side, ⁓ you know, it wasn’t, my childhood wasn’t like strict, like these are how you do things, but there were certain things you’re like, you just don’t do those things to other people. And I think like, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Anthony Codispoti (44:08)
Well, it sounds like your parents were living by example, right? Like,

somebody returns the weed whacker and it’s dirty and the gas can’t, you it’s not filled up. And so you hear your dad talk about that. That just sort of gets filed away. Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (44:18)
Exactly. Now,

you know, and as you know, and we would go to the farmers market, and if somebody, you know, would would would, you know, give extra portion of whatever it is, like, you know, my parents would be forever grateful and always go to that stand, for example. So that sense of loyalty also is certainly in there. But it does it did shape me Anthony, where I am today. And ironically enough, it made those tough decisions back to your initial question, a lot easier for me, because I

you know, a lot of people say like, just do the right thing. And I always say like, gosh, if everyone just did the right thing, like, imagine how beautiful the world would be. And someone asked me, Anthony, like, how do know when you’re doing the right thing? I’m like, come on, when you’re not doing the right thing, don’t you feel it in your belly? You feel it in your belly, right? And I don’t know, maybe some people don’t have that feeling, but you know, exactly. I’m just like, every night, I want to lay my head down on my pillow and say,

Anthony Codispoti (45:08)
Or they’ve gotten better at ignoring it, I don’t know. ⁓

Melanie Brensinger (45:14)
especially in this part for business and the investors dollars, I want them to know that like if I’m not sleeping, it’s because I’m looking after their capital. I don’t want them to lose sleep because they made the decision to trust me.

Anthony Codispoti (45:29)
Yeah. And so as you were going through that difficult breakup and you use the word brutal, and I understand that, I’ve been there before and it can be incredibly trying. How did you get through it? Who did you lean on? What were sort of your coping mechanisms?

Melanie Brensinger (45:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Anthony, know, one thing is that I think that the only, like one of the words that comes to me is really about, I would never have said before that I’m courageous. ⁓ I think when people use the word courageous, they think like, would I jump out of a plane? Like, would I do all these courageous things? I think that for me, ⁓

through that experience, I thought about people who were whistleblowers or people who did things that you’re like, holy cow, I can’t believe they did that. Like it destroyed like on the outside, like their lives, but to do the right thing or like in extreme ways, right? Or like, gosh, this person like, you know, took a stand for something.

to because they were principled and had a bigger sense of responsibility than just themselves. I think that when I heard those stories before, I never could really understand it or think about why did they do that or what compelled them to do that or what did that really mean for them to have to do that? What were they risking?

what were they willing to risk and why and how did they go through that? And like, this is, this is like a, a smaller thing than that. But I would say that it took so much courage to say, this is what needs to be done. And I don’t know how this is going to work out, but this is what needs to be done. And some days, Anthony, would say like, what am I doing?

How did I get here? What happened? What is going on? And I think, you know, I have some people in the industry that are senior to me in years and wisdom that I spent a lot of time talking to about this to say, what did you have to do? I mean, other people have had partner breakups before. So like, how did you do it? What did you do? How did you think about it?

I think all of that was really important in terms of logistically. How do you do things from a business perspective? But then in my personal life, I also relied on people who know me and know kind of who I am as an individual and where my stress points are. in an ironic sort of way, Anthony, if I didn’t do what I was doing, I would feel it in my belly to say, this isn’t right. I got to do what’s right. And so ironically going through this and

thinking about being courageous, following that fiduciary responsibility, it allowed me a sense of calmness, that being terrified of what the outcome is gonna be. Again, I could lay my head on the pillow at night knowing that I was at least doing the right thing, everything else I couldn’t control, but doing the wrong thing and not having all the turmoil, it wasn’t palatable for me anymore. I had to, I felt like I had no choice. It wasn’t like I…

just made some decision. I felt like I had no choice and I had to do what I had to do.

Anthony Codispoti (49:03)
And so how did that transition from the previous venture into A1A ⁓ happen?

Melanie Brensinger (49:09)
Yeah, so I launched when we ⁓ decided we weren’t raising fund two together, I launched A1A. We’re based in Florida, so A1A as you might know from the old Vanilla Ice song, Ice Ice Baby, it talks about A1A Beachfront Avenue. So A1A is a long highway in Florida. ⁓

For trademark purposes, we’re not named after a federal highway. ⁓ We are first in the phone book. If there’s a phone book out there, we’re first in the alphabet for conferences. ⁓ And so I rebranded under A1A. I brought some folks ⁓ over from my prior firm and augmented the team and really took all the great lessons from my prior firm and brought it forward to A1A and complimented it with.

Anthony Codispoti (49:38)
Hahaha

Melanie Brensinger (49:57)
with I think even greater skill set and greater future and opportunity. As I mentioned, I brought on a partner that has very strong operational expertise. He was a former operator at a number of dialysis businesses and under other healthcare ⁓ companies. And so he brings and has a bit of a financial background as well, but really brought him on from an operational perspective. And also I should mention, ⁓

my investment team comes from the GE background. They’ve all been at GE at one time or another. So has that strong underwriting ⁓ background and skill set that I talked about before with no principal ⁓ losses and really underwriting senior debt as if you’re common equity ⁓ and comes with kind of that same mindset. Not that we all think the same because we have a lot of healthy debates together, but again, the core values of our team.

align really well and I can trust every one of them that if I’m not in the room, they’re representing our brand well and I feel proud of them wherever they are. I know that they’re representing me and they’re representing the brand and I know that they feel the same way about me. And I think that that’s a really special thing when you have such a great team that you can trust and rely on and you know that you could interchange any one of us and you’re probably gonna get a similar answer because again,

our core values align nicely. And a lot of the philanthropic work I do, I involve the team and I love that they’re always ready to jump in and take a hold and.

Anthony Codispoti (51:32)
Let’s

talk about some of that philanthropic work. You’re really busy, Melanie. You’re you you built another, you large fund, lots of investments. And why why are you carving out so much time for all these philanthropic efforts?

Melanie Brensinger (51:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I feel Anthony that there, gosh, there’s so much work to be done. ⁓ There’s so many initiatives and goals and people and just so much good to do in the world. Not to say the world’s bad, but there’s so much good to do. And I always just try to encourage folks to find what they’re passionate about or what they believe in. We were talking about

Breast cancer and things of that nature, know, whatever anyone’s passionate about can get behind You know just do it and it doesn’t have to be money a lot of times in nonprofit work it’s also time and I think that ⁓ having a passion and contributing outside of ⁓ Something that’s not directly economically beneficial, you know back to you I find that when I do this work ⁓

what I get in return is so much more than what I’m giving. And so I feel like for me, it fills up my teacup when I’m doing different types of work. And I see that something small that I can do makes such a ⁓ huge change in someone else’s lives. And I think that sometimes people think that they have to do some big grand gesture to make a change, but sometimes it’s a small stuff. you know, I,

I lived in New York for many, many years. you know, I worked at 299 Park at G and there was an old woman, she was probably 80 years old, Anthony, who was homeless, living on the street. And she would be at the church right next to us every morning because they had a food bank there. And I would stop by and I would talk with her every day. She knew my name, she knew all about my life, I knew her name. We would chat, you know, I offered to bring her into my home to allow her to shower, I would bring her food.

And she was such a prideful woman. She would never want to take things when I first met her. And then I got to know her a little bit more. I would take her to go get some food and stuff. And I remember one day Anthony, was sitting talking to her and a guy walked by and he threw a banana down on the ground. Now, mind you, I’m like leaning down in a full business suit talking to her and he throws this banana down. And I thought, what are you doing? You know, she’s not like a monkey in the zoo. This is an elderly woman.

actually stood up and I went, imagine me running down the street, tapped him on the shoulder and said, like, what are you doing? He said, oh, I figured she wanted something to eat. I said, have you ever thought about that that could be your grandmother? He’s like, my grandmother would never be homeless. And I thought, like, why am I engaging in this ridiculous conversation? So my point is that I really believe, like, me stopping and talking with her connected me to humility in a way that

Anthony Codispoti (54:26)
Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (54:38)
when I walked in the doors of GE and all the power and greed and money and success and everything else that goes along with my industry more broadly, it’s a great balance to say at the end of the day, we’re all people and we have to think about each other as such. so at GE, they had a matching program where whatever we would agree to do, they would match as long as it was a 501C3, they would match. So they never told us what we’d have to

contribute, you could choose and they would match. And I love that idea because it allows people to decide what they want to do. But for my team, we’ve done all sorts of things together. 51 vets is a prime example of helping Navy SEALs, Green Brewery or other ⁓ elite veterans enter the financial services world. And my team has helped out a ton there. The Pitt Foundation I created after going to Kenya and my first trip was between ⁓

my prior bank, NGE, I was there for 21 days with no water or electricity. And, you it was my first time going to Africa and met some kids there and just felt a tremendous social responsibility to do something. And now I spend a ton of time advocating for animal rights and helping shelter dogs, as I mentioned. And, you know, what I’ve learned is that, you know, if something happens to your pet, in most states, animals are considered property.

and there’s no accountability or recourse back to back to individuals because it’s all about the price of the animal and for rescues, know, technically they’re worthless. so there and I feel like that, you know, animals in general and specifically dogs, that’s where my passion is don’t have a voice. So, you know, sometimes it’s about being the voice to the voiceless, but, you know, I would encourage people to, to think about kind of what puts that smile on their face and helping other

people or things are doing just something that balances out the other part of the world of accumulating things and accumulating wealth.

Anthony Codispoti (56:46)
love all those philosophies. I just kind of want to give that last segment a giant big hug. And I know another one of your philosophies, Melanie, is ⁓ when it comes to sort of determining your investments, if you do good patient care, everything else flows from there. Can you talk more about that?

Melanie Brensinger (56:50)
Hahaha

Mm.

That’s right.

Yeah, so you know, investing in healthcare, it can be a double edged sword because as much as healthcare is a great way to give back to communities, you know, the underlying patient populations and with our which our portfolio companies are servings, our mothers, daughters, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandfathers, you know, these are all us, right in many ways. And

Again, back to that sense of accountability and responsibility that I talked about previously from a value perspective. You you can make money in the healthcare industry ⁓ in ways that can compromise patient safety, can compromise patient care, ⁓ can drive up costs, which could limit ⁓ access to care. But you could, as an investor, you can make a lot of money.

doing some of those things. You can find niches in the reimbursement environment where you can do investments and make a ton of money for your investors, ⁓ but you’re playing games, right, with the reimbursement world and sometimes that can stop. ⁓ Or you could end up backing pharmaceutical drugs or med device companies or services that ⁓ knowingly could do harm to patients. And so…

You know, I’ve seen people make a lot of money in healthcare around some of these things. I would say that they’re not intentional about everything I just said, but they’re also not looking directly at it because it’s better to look at like, Hey, I can make a ton of money for my investors. So I, you know, I think, and I know we’re doing it. You can make great return for your investors. You know, our return profile and these are some,

more complicated return perspective, but our returns are above 20 % gross IRR in the land of investing. That’s usually private equity returns and we’re getting that on like debt structures. And I would say we make really good returns for our investors, but we do it in a socially responsible way. if we see a company that we could go in there and we could slash costs.

We could get rid of a bunch of services. We could pull out a different geographic markets that maybe aren’t reimbursing the way that other high reimbursement markets would do, but it could like close down a hospital, community hospital, or close down access to care. We won’t do those deals. We ⁓ firmly believe that we can make money for our investors and not hurt people in that way.

And you know, there’s examples, Anthony, of deals and investments we’ve looked at that that would absolutely happen in order to make the numbers work. You would see like if you look at the opportunity and say, wow, these like five locations are making a lot of money. These three locations they’re making next to no money. If we cut those three locations, we can obviously drive our revenues and our earnings up. And that’s great for the business. But now what happens to those communities?

if we’re closing down the only ⁓ neonatal care unit in that area, or we’re closing down ⁓ the only pediatric neurology ⁓ center in that market, what is this gonna mean? There’s areas of healthcare, Anthony, where women are driving nearly two hours to get to the closest ⁓ OBGYN, pregnant women. So you can imagine,

What if she goes into birth? What if labor? You know, what if she’s driving trying to get to the hospital for care? mean, those are things that you like for us when we’re making investments in health care like we just won’t do We there’s a way to make money in health care and still do good by patients So we look at what is this going to mean to the patient population and then back up from there about how do we think about the investment?

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:04)
And so is that a deal you would just walk away from or you would approach it differently? You could look at it and say, if we close these two centers, we’ll be profitable right away. We’ll start getting a good return right out of the gate. Are you like, we’re just going to walk away from that? Or you’re like, what’s a way we can participate in this deal and try to fix those centers?

Melanie Brensinger (1:01:25)
It would depend, Anthony, about the management’s views on this. if they were saying, like, we want to close these locations because we want to drive up revenue and, like, you’re coming into the deal, so sure, you want that. And we say, listen, we don’t actually want that. There’s other ways to drive revenue without closing these three centers. And they’re like, great, let’s do that because we were doing this because we’re bringing an outside investor.

I love that, right? If they’re like, listen, we need to drive revenue because we need to make money for ourselves and like, who cares about these three locations? They came to us through an acquisition and we’re going to close them down. And I asked the question, my team asked the question, what about that community? they’re like, that’s it. Say we don’t care, but like that’s somebody else’s problem. Then we might not do that deal. So it depends on how the management or other investors.

⁓ react and respond to that, to know do we have the right partner again back to like how we move in the world? Like how did they end up there in the first place and then how would they fix it? And are we aligning that we can’t hurt the community and the patient population and how they react to that ⁓ will tell us what we need to know looking into a deal. So we might pass or we might adjust the strategy to make the changes as needed.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:47)
Now, Melody, you co-founded the Women’s Investor Network Council. Tell us about the work that you’re doing there.

Melanie Brensinger (1:02:53)
Yeah, so I, as I mentioned in the bio, I was on the SBIA Board of Governors, which is the kind of organization that works kind of in tandem with the SBA for the SBIC program, which is a way for people to fundraise and get money to raise essentially private credit funds. And ⁓

This is across the board in finance, but as you might imagine, there’s not a whole lot of women who are out there founding firms and leading ⁓ organizations and funds. There’s certainly partners that are out there, but very few entrepreneurial women who are doing this and very few sole GP ⁓ female entrepreneurs. So Wink was really founded by myself and two other female owners of their firms and founders of their firms.

to really support each other, so other founders and other women within our universe who are founding partners or managing partners or sitting kind of that high level seat at the management company and the GP running funds, but also how can we support other women in the industry, ⁓ giving them access to us to talk about.

you know, if they’re interested in their own entrepreneurial journey, how would they go about doing that, you know, giving them that courage to like, you know, jump off the side of the building, not scaring them Anthony, though, because they’ll never jump. But also, you know, like, I’ll have I’ll have a bungee cord for you. So job and watch what happens or they’re not ready to jump, you know, how to help them have the conversation around carries carried interest and ownership interests.

Anthony Codispoti (1:04:22)
Tell them a little bit, but not so much. They need a little bit of that ignorance is bliss kind of thing.

Melanie Brensinger (1:04:37)
so they can start to get the mindset of being an owner versus just collecting a paycheck. And so Wink is the acronym we created, but Wink was really created to provide a networking solution for people in the industry and women to come together and provide those resources. And it’s not just a networking like go and have a tea party together, but where there are gaps in either a skill sets or access.

⁓ to knowledge and then also like giving an avenue to have those difficult conversations. So as part of Wink, for example, some junior women have reached out to me and say like, hey, I’m about to get promoted. You know, I don’t even know what type of carried interest to think about. And again, that’s like a, in our world, that’s like a distribution of profits that come down to people in a fund. And like, sometimes people don’t even know how to have that conversation, like what carry interest should I get or?

negotiating salary increases or wanting to take a board seat, a voting board seat and having the courage to say like, I’ve never had a voting board seat, but I think I’m more than competent to do this, allocate that board seat to me. So it’s networking, it’s skill building, it’s resource building, and it just provides a pathway and an avenue for women to come together and have those types of conversations within the industry.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:02)
Before I ask my last question here Melanie, I’m gonna give people your website so they know how to find you and get in touch with you. That is a one a IP calm the IP is for investment partners and the one is the numeral one not spelled out. a one a IP calm So last question for you Melanie you and I connect one year from now and you are celebrating something big. What is that thing?

Melanie Brensinger (1:06:29)
Yes, gosh, one year from now. So my goal longer term for a one a is that I’ll say personally and professionally, my goal for a one is so when somebody thinks about health care, they think about a one a and ideally over time, we have a pool of capital raise so that if we see a great health care investment, whether it’s be bench, health care, venture, health care, venture debt, health care, private equity,

healthcare, real estate, whatever it is, we have a pool of capital to be able to deploy in those great investments. In addition to that, we’re building out through my partner, I mentioned on the operations side, ⁓ a group of operational experts who can come in either for our portfolio companies or for other people’s healthcare companies that are potentially troubled to help them right size whatever it is that’s happening. And so ⁓ a year from today, from a,

a business perspective, I love to see some of those strategy, grow strategies for a one a to continue to develop and expand. ⁓ I know that a year from now, we’ll still have done a number of good investments because I can’t imagine doing anything else. And ⁓ I’m really excited to see our team continue to grow and develop watching talent, you know, do things and my team members do things that they didn’t think were possible is something I find really exciting. So

⁓ That’s how I think about our business a year from now. I would say that some of the philanthropic work that I just mentioned to you, a year from now, I’m hoping that ⁓ in the local level, we can start to get some laws changed ⁓ to have a little bit more flexibility for domesticating animal rights. And then on the shelter side, ⁓ I’ve been doing a lot of medical sponsorship to get ⁓ dogs out of high.

kill shelters, so we’ve done eight so far in last two months. And I hope in a year from now, we have a lot more success stories around that. And I’m super excited, Anthony, to come back to you in a year and find out what we’re up to as well.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:39)
Melanie, that was awesome.

Melanie Brensinger (1:08:41)
Anthony, we went all over the place. Nothing in our questions. were everywhere. I was like, I hope this is okay. So hopefully. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:42)
It was great, wasn’t it?

is more than okay. You know, it’s interesting

when I first started the podcast, I had a chance to talk to somebody who’d been podcasting for a while. And, you know, just kind of talking about the approach. And they said something that stuck with me. They’re like, the best interviews are ones where you don’t even look at the questions. Like it just happens naturally. Like, you know, if you and I were to meet at a dinner party, like how would our conversation go? I’m not pulling out, you know, like a little cheat sheet. It’s like, wait, you did what?

Melanie Brensinger (1:09:15)
Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Anthony Codispoti (1:09:17)
wait, you said

something about animals. Why animals? Tell me about this small town you grew up in.

Melanie Brensinger (1:09:19)
Yeah.

Yeah,

no. And it was funny, Anthony, because I realized that some of the stuff we talked about are the things that people don’t like I could come and talk, you know, talk to you a ton about like the business part of what I do, we covered a bunch of that. But I think sometimes it’s also to connect to the person and understand right, because those are the nuggets. If I think about your audience, hopefully they can pick up some things, whether they’re going through something or

Anthony Codispoti (1:09:35)
Ahem.

Melanie Brensinger (1:09:48)
You know, and you’re right, there’s so much more to my partner’s story, which I was trying to dance around that a little bit. Yeah, but basically long and short, Anthony, he’s just a bad actor. And he was doing some completely inappropriate things. And I knew, I was like, if I go down this path with him, he’s gonna get, you know, 50-50 partners. We’re gonna get in a world of hurt, and I’m not willing to destroy my reputation for him.

Anthony Codispoti (1:09:53)
And I could tell, so I didn’t pry too much, yeah.

Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (1:10:16)
And his way of dealing with stress was in a lot of unhealthy ways. And every time he would do things, he would say, I’ll change. I was like being with an addict. Every time he would do something, he’d, oh, I’ll change. I won’t do it again. But then he started to do some of it in front of my investors. And my investors asked me about it. And I basically had a whistle blow on our company and say, yeah, he is doing these things. I’m trying to manage it. And I tried to buy him out.

Anthony Codispoti (1:10:27)
Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (1:10:43)
The investors told him to leave and he just said like, sue me, remove me. I’m not leaving. So he refused to leave. And it was so tough, Anthony. And I just said like, I can’t, have to do this. And you know, when I told on, I confirmed the investors this is happening, we got our management fee cut off. ⁓ And so economically it was terrible for me. But I said, you know what? If at the end of the day, the investors say I can trust her.

Anthony Codispoti (1:10:47)
Wow.

Melanie Brensinger (1:11:11)
And I know in a difficult situation, she’ll come talk to us. eventually I got a long career ahead of me. Like, this is going to work itself out. And sure enough, like, the other investors that were in anagenesis came over and invested in a one a and are very supportive. And like my former partner, I don’t think he’ll ever be able to raise a dollar in the industry or ever get a job in the industry again. And, um, you know, he, the person that I signed up with him was like,

the sunny day person, but in an entrepreneurship journey, you have so many rainy days. How do people deal with the rainy days? And he like escalated his behavior as he got more stressed. And that was a real struggle. And those are just like borders I wasn’t willing to cross back to some of those moral questions.

Anthony Codispoti (1:11:47)
Yeah.

And wow,

like hats off to you, because that’s a really tough position to be in. ⁓ And you’re you’re being pulled, you know, different directions. It’s like there’s the financial side of you that wants to keep trying to make this work. And but there’s the this is just wrong. This is just plain wrong part of you. And like to take that bold step of getting the management fees cut off, basically, you know, kind of

Melanie Brensinger (1:12:05)
Bye bye.

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (1:12:26)
what’s the metaphor I’m looking for you, you’re sort of cutting the tree off at its roots, right? So this is the only way that you could think of to let it die.

Melanie Brensinger (1:12:31)
yeah.

I mean, if you think about Anthony, we were making 2 % on $274 million a year. You can do the math around that. And that would have gone on for another five years. And we could have raised fund too, so easy, because we had such good success. And by the way, in the track record at Endogenesis, we did 16 deals. And I did 15 of them. He did one, and his deal went sideways. And so I ended up having to work out his deal.

Anthony Codispoti (1:12:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

you

Melanie Brensinger (1:13:02)
I told him at one point, said, just go sit in your office. Don’t make any problems. Just don’t screw anything up and we’ll figure this out. And he couldn’t do that. And I said, you know what? No. I said, you know what? You’re going to get us in trouble with SEC, with SBA, with our investors. I’m not willing to take that reputational risk. And on top of it, you did one deal. And you totally mucked up that one deal. And then you weren’t even honest when it went sideways.

Anthony Codispoti (1:13:11)
He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t just sit on his hands.

Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (1:13:31)
and I have to work out that one deal and I just thought like life is too short and I thought about we could have easily raised fun too if this didn’t happen like fun too was pretty much already in the bag so we would have probably raised another like 500 and you do 2 % off of that like these are huge numbers but I said you know what like I can’t do this I can’t be so stressed about like what is he gonna do next right like

Anthony Codispoti (1:13:48)
Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (1:13:57)
what is gonna happen? Because as we were starting to raise fund two, and you’re like, thinking about doing that, he was doing some stuff with like some of the public pension funds and whatnot, which are like major no nos for the SEC. And I’m like, own 50 % of the company. And like, you see enough of these stories where somebody is like, well, did you know? And like, I was like replaying in my head, like I’m sitting there like, yes, I knew, okay, why didn’t you do anything?

Anthony Codispoti (1:14:21)
Hmm.

Melanie Brensinger (1:14:22)
⁓ I don’t know, you know, because it was better financially for me not to do anything like it’s terrible, right? Like I would replay like how this whole thing was going to unravel. And I basically had to go to the investors and say, this is what’s happening. And they were like, we’ve never had anyone do this before. You know, and now I know so many other people have this happening in their firms, but they do it like undercover. Because usually you don’t have two partners that are 5050.

Anthony Codispoti (1:14:45)
Really? Wow.

Melanie Brensinger (1:14:51)
you might have three or four where if you have to boot one, you can still kind of move on with your firm and like, they’ll create some story like once it’s been more time with his family, you know, like all these stories, right? And it’s done undercover. But for us two person show, you know, it had to be done in a way that, you know, you know, I couldn’t really and I even told them like, let’s create a story, I’ll buy you out. You can go do something else. And he just he said, if I’m going down, you’re going down.

Anthony Codispoti (1:15:00)
huh, okay. Yeah.

That’s wild.

Melanie Brensinger (1:15:20)
So yeah, so it you know now though Anthony like when when tough things come at me I’m like what come on that’s Yeah, that’s nothing I can handle that which I think again, I’m a much better investor ⁓ Because of it and it also one of the other things we didn’t talk about this Anthony, but I I Mentioned this a little bit, but it’s almost like when you think

you have it figured out, you forget that there’s blind spots. And so what I was saying is like, I knew on the investment side, like I can figure out how to protect downside and structure and like all these things. But I had a blind spot when it came to my own partnership, right, which is kind of why. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (1:16:06)
Right? That was the interesting thing. I started,

I was getting ready to call that out and we moved on to something else. You were so accustomed to building these structures to protect against sort of the outside world that in your own office, it kind of, yeah, you kind of overlooked it.

Melanie Brensinger (1:16:12)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, was wild.

It was really wild and it’s such a lot of lessons. So now I talked again other partnerships about like, here’s how to do it. So ⁓ anyway, yeah, and I didn’t talk about this in the recording because I didn’t want to get upset, but my dog actually was killed. And she was only four. She was a rescue and I took her to Blue Pearl.

animal hospital because she had like a little snag nail on her foot. She snagged it running up the steps. So I called her vet and they were closed and they said, I’ll just take her to Blue Pearl. It’s an emergency hospital. They’ll just put a little lidocaine on a clipper nail. So my husband and went to the Blue Pearl. We went to the back of the exam room and they said, we’ll take her in the back. Come up with a care plan and come back. They came back 30 minutes later. Anthony said her heart stopped. They were giving her CPR.

We’re like, what are you even talking about? Here they confused her with another dog and they gave her methadone and killed her. They gave her methadone for 110 pound dog. Now mind you, they didn’t even have permission to give her methadone, let alone overdose her on methadone. And so I learned through that, that just happened March of this year. And I learned through that experience that, you know, I was like, this vet needs to be held accountable. Like they were crazy and they, like,

tried to hold her hostage after they killed her until we paid the vet bill, which the vet bill was like $1,700, thousand. Exactly, and a thousand of it was to give her CPR to try to bring her back. And I realized like when I talked to the medical director there, she was gonna die anyway, it just happened to be in our care. like, what are you even saying? Is that your medical opinion? And I was torn, Anthony, because I financed vet clinics before.

Anthony Codispoti (1:17:52)
for killing your dog.

Mmm.

Melanie Brensinger (1:18:13)
like roll

up that businesses. And I was like, you know, like all these vet companies now are owned by private equity, as it turns out, Blue Pearl is owned by the Mars family, which took me down a whole nother race, you know, the candy company. And they, yeah, they make dog food, they do clinical trials on the pharmaceutical side, and they own many of the vet not just Blue Pearl, a number of other chains, and they on their website said that they touched 90 %

Anthony Codispoti (1:18:28)
Yeah. And they make dog food.

Melanie Brensinger (1:18:43)
of all pets in the world and their private company. And so when this whole thing happened, her name was Rue, and I talked with them, I said, this is unacceptable. And they said, well, we know you’re frustrated, but don’t be angry with us. I’m like, I’m not frustrated. Where’s your accountability? How are you going to make sure you don’t do this again? How did this happen? Well, the emergency room is chaotic. I’m like,

think if you’re a human and you go to emergency room and they overdose you and kill you, like it has to be reported somewhere in that world. It doesn’t have to be reported anywhere, Anthony. So they literally killed her and it doesn’t need, they don’t need to report anywhere. So, you know, I reported that to the Florida veterinary board. had to write this whole complaint about ⁓ what happened. And then I talked to like, ⁓

a lawyer about, you know, that what had happened, not really for financial gain, but ⁓ they, when I put negative reviews up on the out, this is another fascinating thing, Google and Reddit, they actually took down my negative review. And I didn’t even know you could take down negative reviews. But if you look at this blue pearl, they have like a 4.8 rating. But it’s because they take down negative reviews. So

I was devastated. She was like our kid. And we took her there for a nail and we carried her home. Then we actually drove to Pennsylvania to my parents’ property in the little town and we buried her at my parents’ property. And coming through that, I was like, we can’t get another dog. What are we doing? And I said, know what, I’m just going to go to the shelter and start to just go and sit in there because she was a rescue.

just to be around other dogs. And now, like I told you, in last two months, I’ve been doing these medical sponsorships where, you know, if a dog’s at the shelter and somebody wants to adopt them, but like they know that there’s gonna be heavy medical costs because the dog was sick or hurt, you know, I’ve been raising money to basically pay for the vet care.

And we’ve done that with eight dogs. Like there was a dog, a German Shepherd that had broken pelvis and we got him to the bed, got his pelvis fixed. Now he went to a foster and now he’s been adopted. So, and we just last Friday rescued another dog, Anthony. So it’s been a wild journey. And while we were on the podcast, I thought she might pop up because she came in like, she’s a puppy. So she was like chewing the back of my hair while we were talking. I was like, this is interesting because she’s going to get showcased in the podcast. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (1:21:19)
That would have been great.

Melanie Brensinger (1:21:21)
Yeah, so this has been like, I mean, I’ve had dogs all my life, but this situation that happened at Blue Pearl has showed me a lot from a political perspective about the laws and regulations that are in place. And then also has had me rethink about if I would invest in a vet roll up again, and back to the point about patient care first, how do you make sure that what you’re doing isn’t driving the bottom line ⁓ in a way that pushes

things like this and mistakes that happen that, you know, animals are getting killed.

Anthony Codispoti (1:21:54)
Could you

create kind of a whole new model isn’t the right word, but like an underlying ethos. Like you’re talking about how like there’s no accountability, you know, it’s, it’s property. It’s like, you know, very different from like, if you know, humans in a hospital, like, could you create a new approach? I don’t know.

Melanie Brensinger (1:22:01)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Well,

yeah, Anthony, so what I’ve been talking to, there’s a guy actually who runs another fund in Tampa, and he knows about what happened. And he said, Mel, you know, my sister is married to the Florida state senator. If you want to talk to him about animal rights in the state of Florida, like we can set up that meeting. And so I think part of it are the laws that are in place, but also like with a veterinary board and the licensing.

Like I feel like if this accident happens or this mistake happens as they call it, like you should have to report it to the veterinary board to say this happened, document it, because the veterinary board is sitting out there and like, they don’t have to have any reporting. Like they don’t, until I reported it, they had no idea this incident happened. And now I found talking with people, like another woman took her cat there to get spayed and they cut off the cat’s leg.

they amputated a leg. And like another person had a parrot that they took their like ingested something, and they clipped its wings. So this is now I know, this wasn’t just about route, they’ve didn’t like they’ve done some horrific things. And I know it’s not just this blue pearl. Because I actually was on a radio, a guy that I know that hosts a radio show every day, he put me on the radio to talk about it. And after I was on the radio, people have reached out to me. So part of it,

Anthony Codispoti (1:23:14)
my God.

It’s a pattern.

Melanie Brensinger (1:23:42)
like it’s kind of a two to kind of three wrong approach. One is getting justice for her, like holding these bets accountable. The second part is thinking about other ways to change the industry to make sure that A, this doesn’t happen or B, when it does that it’s reported. And then C is kind of the good side of things like usually tragedy, people do like something good to try to build upon that. So ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (1:24:06)
Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (1:24:08)
So doing what I’m doing with these medical sponsorships and the rescue ⁓ is one element of that. And then second part is that person who put me on the radio owns a big ranch in Texas and he’s ⁓ generously agreed to donate five acres of land to build a rescue there for dogs. So that will be named Rue’s Rescue. So in a year from now, hopefully on my wishlist, we’ll be ⁓ getting that rescue going. So yeah, behind.

Anthony Codispoti (1:24:34)
That’s so cool. Brew is the name

of your dog?

Melanie Brensinger (1:24:37)
Yeah. huh. Yes. And she was, you know, I do have pets at all or no.

Anthony Codispoti (1:24:42)
I had a bunch of pets growing up. We don’t have any at the moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Melanie Brensinger (1:24:45)
Okay, so

you know with animals they look at sometimes I feel like they look in your pierce your soul at times so um and it and they really made me to the point this last day I won’t take too much of your time but to the point about how things happen and deal with stress when that happened and I was like laying over her like Praying to God that somehow the CPR was gonna work to bring her back. It made me like realize that like

Anthony Codispoti (1:24:57)
Sorry.

Melanie Brensinger (1:25:12)
this isn’t the only loss, right? Like my parents are still around, they’re getting older, like thinking about losing something or someone that you love and how to navigate that. Like, I don’t know if you’ve had a lot of like death in your life, just my grandparents, like I’ve been like been around a lot of people that I know dying. So like, I had to think about like, how do I work through this in a healthy way? And like, you know, so many people would say, just take a Xanax or have a glass of wine. I’m like, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not doing that. I’m going to go and like,

sit at Miami Dade Animal Shelter on a Saturday and cry for like two hours and figure out like, how am gonna work through this, right? And so, like, I think so much, I’m telling you this story because so much of this brings me to like do this podcast with you today. Like if I did this with you a year ago, or like two years ago, frankly, before this happened with my partner and before this happened with Rue.

Like those two experiences have changed me so much as a person, but also made it so clear about like what I want to do with my time and who I want to be around and like what matters to me. And I think it just made me a better like human being in a lot of different ways. So if you and I did this probably three years ago, I would have probably been, I don’t want to say sharper.

but I sharper meaning like less vulnerable. It’s a way to put it. Cause I worked in New York for 17 years, right? So yeah, yeah. But the way I the world now is a little, like I’m still very successful and I’m still really good what I do in business, but I just think about things a little bit differently.

Anthony Codispoti (1:26:40)
Less vulnerable. Yeah. You develop an edge. You develop a certain edge doing that. Yeah, I get it.

I love that. Thank you for sharing that.

I’m already looking forward to that. Melanie Brenzinger from A1A Investment Partners. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Melanie Brensinger (1:27:10)
Anthony, thank you so much for for having me on today. And I have to give a shout out to Peter Harris from our University Growth Fund, they’re doing amazing work at University Growth Fund as well. And I feel fortunate that he connected us together. And for anybody in your audience, I know you gave our ⁓ our website address, but ⁓ for anyone who wants to connect with me, ⁓ feel free and we’ll be in touch and I’d be happy to chat more.

Anthony Codispoti (1:27:36)
How would you like people to get in touch with you, Melanie?

Melanie Brensinger (1:27:38)
They can go to our website, but ⁓ I’m okay giving my email address to Anthony, which is Melanie and me l a n i e at a one a IP calm.

Anthony Codispoti (1:27:49)
And we’ll make sure we include a link to that in the show notes. And yes, shout out to Peter Harris for connecting us. He’s connected me with a lot of wonderful guests. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.

Melanie Brensinger (1:28:02)
Thank you.