You could call Michael Bleyzer flexible — and we’re not even talking about the gymnastics he started doing a couple years ago at age 57.
Bleyzer has proven himself adaptable in business, too. After earning his master of science in digital electronics and quantum physics in what is now Ukraine, he cultivated desert land for agriculture. Then he left the former Soviet Union and relocated to Texas, where he worked at Exxon before founding a private equity firm — not quite a lateral career progression.
Bleyzer learned that formal training would only take him so far, and he had to pull from his experience to find success beyond that.
“Whatever you learned in school is not going to provide all the answers,” he says. “It’s not necessarily what you know; it’s how you approach it.”
When he founded SigmaBleyzer Investment Group LLC in 1994, the buyout firm’s main focus was turning around distressed companies in emerging markets. Though the firm has always been based in Houston, it only recently began investing in mature markets outside of Eastern Europe.
By being flexible enough to apply the same due diligence to different companies in new markets, the president and CEO has made a flowchart type of process out of his business — which is fitting, considering it’s a business built around flexibility.
“Some people call it distress, some people call it turnarounds, but it’s also known as workout,” Bleyzer says. “You work things out. That concept is applicable, in my opinion, to everything you do in life. … You are always ready to change your ways of getting to your goal.”
Bleyzer has become an expert at guiding distressed companies down new paths toward their goals. But what stays the same is his dedicated approach to due diligence when selecting portfolio companies. Because he’s focused on what he’s looking for and thorough about inspecting opportunities, he has led SigmaBleyzer smoothly from emerging to mature markets.
“Because we succeeded early on in becoming the emerging market specialist, we’ve been typecast as such,” he says. “In my mind, we are certainly successful at executing the strategy and turning around distressed businesses — whether they’re in emerging markets or mature markets, that’s irrelevant.”
Whether you’re considering an acquisition of your own or just trying to position your company to withstand challenges, Bleyzer’s step-by-step process for evaluating opportunities can serve as a model.
