KKR exec tells young people to get up from their desks if they want to be successful dealmakers

• Private-equity dealmaking is down, but all is not lost for young dealmakers.
• A panel of private equity execs advised young people to get up from their desks and meet people.
• One exec said it can take 20 years before a relationship pays off.

If you want to be a private-equity dealmaker, you can start by getting up from your desk.

That was the advice from Alisa Amarosa Wood, a KKR executive, at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

"If you're sitting at your desk, you're not building personal relationships every day," said Wood, co-CEO of KKR's Private Equity Conglomerate LLC, an operating company formed to acquire, own, and control portfolio companies. "You should be talking to three to five people you've never talked to before," Wood said. "That's how you source deals. That's how you build a Rolodex. That's how you build a pipeline."

Wood said KKR talks to thousands and thousands of companies a year to do 20 to 40 deals. All of those conversations are about building relationships, she said, echoing comments made by KKR's cofounders at a Milken panel on Monday.

"You might be talking to the same company for two decades before you can go effectuate something that's called private equity," Wood said. "You're not going to fly in and assume you're going to have two meetings and get a deal done."

A.J. Rohde, senior partner at Thoma Bravo, a buyout firm focused on tech and software companies, said that his firm tries to "empower" its younger employees to look for deals themselves.

"The senior people have walked the floor every day like a trading floor," Rohde said. "What are you working on? People need help. They maybe hit a roadblock on diligence. Help them out, give them a perspective, spend five minutes, and then they'll go figure something else out."

The whole goal is getting the youngest employees to feel ready to step into the dealmaker's shoes, he said.

"The best deals happen at a grassroots level," Rohde said. "That's because some VP went on a line and she or he pushed it and made that her career, and she fought for a right to get that, but you were there helping her early to help you make that decision. Those are our best deals."

The comments come at a tough time for the private equity industry. Firms have a lot of money to spend, as well as companies to sell. Dealmaking, however, has been muted this year amid concerns about the impact of Trump's tariff wars on the economy and stock market.