Anchored in insurance, commercial real estate, and industrials, we are a majority employee-owned company built upon a history of deep financial stability. Our permanent capital allows us to make decisions measured in decades. We equip our people with tools to solve complex industry challenges and operate our businesses reliably.
Etude has been founder-led since 2012. The people on this page run its businesses day to day. The team is small enough that decisions are made by the people who carry them out.
Steven Stein founds Etude with $30,000 of personal capital while in high school. The first strategy is liquidation arbitrage: buying business development companies and closed-end funds trading below the value of their holdings.
Etude files its first 13D, on RENN Fund (NYSE: RCG), a Dallas closed-end fund trading at half of book value. Etude acquires 13.5% of the shares, installs Horizon Kinetics as investment adviser and replaces a majority of the board. The shares rise 140% during Etude's ownership.
Etude registers with the Texas State Securities Board and begins managing outside capital. As the largest shareholder of OHA Investment Corporation, Etude leads a 13D group and works with the board on the company's sale to Portman Ridge Finance Corporation. Etude and partners acquire Weigelt Enterprises, an Austin-based landscape construction company, and rename it WLE. Etude leads development of WLE's 8-acre headquarters in southeast Austin.
Through a leveraged buyout, Etude acquires 22 self-storage properties from AAA Storage totaling 1.7 million rentable square feet in Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, its first transaction above $100 million. Etude transitions day-to-day management to CubeSmart and expands 15 of the properties by roughly 600,000 square feet.
WLE grows to 200 employees and makes the Inc. 5000 in 2019 and 2020. In October, Etude and its partners sell the company to BrightView Landscapes.
Net operating income across the storage portfolio grows from $2.6 million at acquisition to $13 million a year, and Wells Fargo refinances the properties. Etude founds SafeLease and Etude Reinsurance to provide insurance and compliance products to the self-storage industry.
SafeLease crosses 1,000 insured facilities in 45 states. Fortune names it one of the 50 Best Workplaces in Texas for the second consecutive year.
Etude and Richard Kinder form Etude Storage Partners to acquire self-storage properties nationally, with a $250 million equity commitment.
SafeLease passes 3,000 insured facilities and launches a nationwide commercial property and general liability offering.
Etude forms Etude Specialty Insurance Company, a Nebraska-domiciled surplus lines carrier capitalized with more than $100 million, to underwrite new insurance products.
Etude founds Flux Steel Works and acquires a 626,000-square-foot former ATI plant in Louisville, Ohio, to produce grain-oriented electrical steel for power transformers. The mill plans more than 260,000 tons of annual capacity, over 200 skilled manufacturing jobs and commercial production in 2029.
New York
80 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018
Bryant Park Studios, built in 1901 by the painter Abraham Archibald Anderson, with tall north-facing windows so artists had steady light to work by. It was made for people building a craft. It still is.
Austin
804 Congress Avenue, Suite 400, Austin, TX 78701
The Bosche-Hogg Building, built in 1897 in the boom that followed the railroad. Six stories of brick on the avenue that runs up to the Capitol, in the Congress Avenue Historic District.
