Main Street Capital Corporation (NYSE:MAIN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bryce Rowe: Got it. Okay. Thanks a bunch. Thank you. Appreciate it, Bryce.

Operator: Next question, Robert Dodd with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Robert Dodd: Hi, guys, and congrats on the quarter. When you look, you’re concerned about some of the deals not closing in the quarter. I mean, you said there wasn’t anything you were concerned about, but was there any kind of theme? Was it final due diligence kind of fell through or people latched it up, the ask on the price or any kind of color you can give us on what the trigger points were on the ones that fell through?

Dwayne Hyzak: Sure, Robert. I’ll give some color, then I’ll let David add on anything that he has from his perspective. But I’d say it wasn’t anything consistent across the transactions that didn’t make it across the finish-line. But as you’ve heard us say in the past, we’re dealing with individuals, not institutions in terms of the counterparty transactions. And they can and will have stuff that changes on their side from a personal standpoint. In my view of one of the transactions, that’s exactly what it was. He had a view of what a transaction, a desirable transaction would be. And I’d say that view over time changed as we went through our process. The other difficulties we’ve had, no big surprise, I think, to people, we continue to be very disciplined in our underwriting approach, not anything different than what we’ve done in the past.

But we always maintain a very disciplined approach. And in this current environment, when you look at the economic uncertainty, whether it’s actual historical results as we go through due diligence, or if it’s the visibility to the future expectations and future results, you’re seeing more volatility. And as we go through the diligence process, we have to deal with that volatility in terms of how we value and structure the final transaction. And that could lead the transaction not to move forward. So those would be the two examples I’d point to. I’ll let David add any additional comments he has on his side.

David Magdol: Yeah, Robert, we were always conscious of our origination budget and trying to drive towards closings. In this quarter, we had some lumpiness. A couple of the examples were one had a safety issue that came up during our diligence. Another one had some financial diligence relative to historical and projections that ultimately we couldn’t get comfortable underwriting to. So when we see those things, while we’re anxious to have closings and put more assets on the books, we’re just going to be disciplined about making sure we’re making good prudent investments like we have historically. And that leads to some quarters that are lumpier than others, nothing to take away as far as themes.

Robert Dodd: Got it. Got it. Thank you. This one’s kind of sort of what would you hearing preliminarily, if anything, on budget outlooks for ’24? Obviously, these are small, but if I’d asked you this 10 years ago, I don’t think most of your portfolio companies had budgets, so to speak. But you’ve been much more rigorous over the years in terms of encouraging those kind of those processes. So are you hearing on anything on that front about 2024, more moderate, more of the same, anything that’s coming through so far?

Dwayne Hyzak: Sure, Robert. As you said, our companies, all of them will go through some level of budgeting process for the next year. Most of them will go through a multi-year outlook or expectation planning process. Most of our companies are likely right in the middle of that process for 2024 today. So we don’t really have information to point to coming out of those budget, 2024 budget discussions. But what I would point you to, and David talked about this in his comments, not specifically the 2024 expectations, but the fact that we just hosted our president’s meeting for our lower middle market companies. And the data point I would give you is that coming out of that meeting, the overall mood, sentiment, expectations from the group broadly is very positive.