LBO Case Study - LBO Structure Guidelines
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The guidelines for leveraged lending given by the Federal Reserve and how they affect the LBO modeling for Red Bull. The typical equity returns that private equity firms expect from such transactions.
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Before we get started on the LBO modeling for Red Bull, it's worth just taking a step back and thinking about the overall structure. Some years ago, the Federal Reserve gave guidelines on leverage lending. Those guidelines were actually thrown out by Congress, but they still form a pretty useful guide for thinking about how to structure highly leveraged transactions. I'm gonna go through the kind of key metrics first because this informs how we'll actually construct the LBO model. One of the key things the Federal Reserve said is that they wanted to limit the amount of leverage in some of these transactions, and so their guideline was that the total debt number post-transaction divided by the LTM EBITDA number should be less than about six times as a leveraged multiple. Now, those are for regulated banks, but of course, if you're an unregulated bank or regulated broker dealer, which is not a bank like Jefferies, for example, then you could probably push beyond that. But that certainly as a kind of guideline in the industry is what is generally accepted. In addition to that, they said, look, we want the senior debt, and that tends to be in lodge transactions that term B tranche.
They want that to be paid off within seven years.
They want the total debt have at least 50% paid off within seven years, so they want to see the structure de-leveraging significantly within a seven year period. In addition, they said that they want equity to be at least 25% of the initial capital structure, so that means debt no greater than 75% of the opening structure. They also were worried about adjustments to LTM EBITDA because that's kind of key valuation metric, and they should be no greater, greater than 25% of the base EBITDA or unadjusted EBITDA because they're worried that a lot of firms are just throwing the kitchen sink into the LTM EBITDA adjustments. With this, this is, gives you a pretty nice benchmark or kind of guidelines for the leverage structure. Okay, so this is the leveraged structure. In addition, from a an equity returns point of view, usually the private equity firm will want returns within a range of 22 to 25% IRR. Now, you can sometimes go below for low risk transactions, so for low risk transactions, eg. Infrastructure assets, you can probably be a high teens IRR. It does depend a little bit, and these are kind of broad guidelines, so it's really worth being careful how these are used, but it's a useful starting point when we are thinking about the leverage within the transaction.