Joe Freeman Jr.: From engineer to private equity
By Kim Spurr

oe Freeman (EMBA '94) was an engineer at Nortel when he decided to get his MBA with the goal of working in marketing or general corporate management in the telecommunications industry.

The investment banking bug hit after he signed up for his first finance class with professor William Jackson, and Freeman decided to completely shift gears.

"I'd never taken any finance courses before. This course showed the merger of financial strategy and corporate strategy; it was a nice combination of quantitative and qualitative skills, how you had to bring those skills together," Freeman said.

"But because I was working and going to school, making that kind of career shift was difficult. I used my vacation days and talked to Carolina alums working on Wall Street. I had to pave my way."

After graduation, Freeman went to work for Salomon Brothers in New York City. After several years in corporate finance, Freeman decided he wanted global experience, so he took a job with the Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund in Johannesburg, investing venture capital in new enterprises.

"When I went there in early 1996, South Africa had gone through a big political transition. The apartheid government had fallen, and there was similar excitement to what happened in the East Bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall," he said. "I was vice president of the largest private equity fund at the time, covering an 11-country region. A $5 million investment I made in an export finance business was two or three times larger than any investment they had done prior to that time."

There were challenges in working in a global environment, and Freeman had to adapt to the business culture there.

"I came from a Wall Street, very aggressive, in-your-face atmosphere," he said. "But as an American, you have to learn that the way you've grown accustomed to doing business may not always be effective in other settings. You might have to take a more toned-down approach."

After two years, Freeman returned to the United States and landed a job as vice president in the Financial Services Group with GE Equity in Stamford, Conn. Private equity seemed to be a perfect fit for him, and he was destined to stay.

"I find private equity much more interesting; it's a deeper experience," he said. "Investment bankers are by nature 'deal' people. They work on a transaction for a client, then move on. I like the private equity world because it's a transaction business with a longer-term horizon, managing a portfolio of investments over a longer period of time."

Freeman's advice for making a career shift: Spend as much time as possible understanding what it is that you like.

"Originally I thought I wanted to stay in operations and work my way up the corporate ladder," he said. "It took me a while to realize I prefer being in a deal-and-transaction environment."