Investing in Coffee with Alternative Asset with Cole Shephard

Cole Shephard is currently a Partner at Legacy Group, an alternative asset manager that seeks profitable investment opportunities with high social and environmental impact in the United States and Latin America. The mission of Legacy Group is to bridge the gap between financial capital and promising investment opportunities in order to create a new community of investors, market-leading companies, and workers who will leave a legacy for future generations. Legacy Group has successfully placed the capital and provided advisory services to companies in the following industries since its inception in 2015: real estate & hospitality, agriculture, arts & technology, and education.

Cole spent the previous eight years working for a global professional services firm (PricewaterhouseCoopers) specializing in accounting, advisory, and consulting solutions before founding Legacy Group in early 2015. Cole worked for the firm in the United States, Bermuda, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and Beijing, China.

Cole primarily focused on accounting and advisory services to clients in industries ranging from oil extraction and distribution to healthcare, banking, private equity, hedge funds, offshore trusts, and biotechnology while working in the United States and Bermuda. Cole spent nearly four years in Asia providing advisory and consulting services to clients involved in global mergers and acquisitions. Cole specialized in the financial services and real estate industries, spending the majority of his time advising on cross-border transactions in the areas of the business strategy review, business valuation, buyer and seller due diligence, tax structuring, and business carve-out analysis. Cole’s transaction experience includes global transactions in the billions of dollars.

Episode Highlights Here:

Cole Shephard:

I focus more on I would say Domestic Tax structuring than I would on the US-based Tax structure.

Pierce York:

You said you liquidate 401k’s and you liquidated your IRAs and all that kind of stuff to move over? How’re the laws differ when it comes to tax deferral?

Cole Shephard:

I would say, the US tax market will be obviously different than what we’d see in Colombia. My main thesis really to come down to Latin America was more towards capital flows, and where I saw inefficiency and capital flows. So for instance, in Hong Kong, when we were talking about buying banks, no one in my circle will be talking about buying banks in Colombia or Mexico or Costa Rica, it just really didn’t exist, this part of the world is vastly underdeveloped for I’d say that M&A space. I think, whereas there is a tremendous amount of opportunity. From a tax perspective down here, I focus more on I would say, domestic tax structuring than I would on the US base tax structuring. I’ve worked at PwC, where you do a lot with tax in thinking about it from a multinational perspective. But you know, when I first liquidated Roth IRAs and 401k’s, the burden to take it on was less to me and say, if I take a tax hit on a 401k, and pay taxes upfront to withdraw money, rather than do a capital pool and give away half of that, a startup business or an idea in my head, it was better to start with my own capital. But I would say from a more if you want to focus on tax down here in Colombia, less so with personal taxation would be the structuring, I would work more on the corporate structures here in Colombia, they have two tax regimes that I think are really attractive here in Colombia. One is ZOMAC, that’s a was enforced about five years ago, you can get your taxable burden down about 50 to 75% discount by investing in what they would call under-invested areas of Colombia, I guess it would be similar to what we’d see in the United States and an OP zone regulation. The second regulation really down here is called the orange economy. It’s related to, you know, digital companies, media companies, and things like agriculture, where areas of industry the Colombian government is trying to promote, and they’ll get your tax rate down to an effective rate of about 9%. So those are the two tax structuring techniques we use look primarily for in-country taxation.

Pierce York:

That’s interesting.