📊 Fascinating data from 344 independent sponsor deals, taken from the UNC Institute for Private Capital's recent study. My 5 biggest takeaways: 1) Independent sponsor deals outperformed similar transactions of similar size executed by private equity firms. This wasn't surprising to us; we believe that entrepreneurial talent (and focus) are the bottleneck in small business, not capital. 2) Total Value to Paid-In Capital was 2.9x on average and 2.1x at the median, with an average IRR of 29% and a median of 24% on fully exited deals. redacted% of investments experienced a loss of capital between 0% and 100%. I suspect a meaningful driver of losses came from using overly expensive debt, which can sometimes be the only option in certain deals. 4) The most common industry was Business Products & Services (51.7% of deals). The most common business size was $2m - $5m of EBITDA (47.4% of deals). 5) 58% of surveyed deals were funded by SBICs, by far the most common type of capital provider. Just let me know if you want the PDF of the full study, it's fascinating.