Austin Peters

 

Austin Peters works for Covest Partners as a private equity investor.  Comvest is a private investment firm who provides equity and debt capital to middle market companies.  Comvest was founded in 2000.  Austin is responsible for supporting the purchase, management, and sale of companies in the Comvest portfolio.  He helps build the relationship between Comvest and the potential sellers and assists in strategic and operational initiatives. 

He attended and graduated from Indiana University with a major in finance and Chinese.  After learning the different majors under the broad business umbrella, he decided on fiancé.  It was a lot of work but also an area that interested him.  In, high school, he had a friend who was Chinese and lived in a multi-generational household.  His friend’s grandparents didn’t speak English, so he began learning some simple phrases to better communicate with them.  In his Senior year, his high school offered Chinese for the first time, allowing him to learn to read and write as well as improve his speaking and listening of the language.  In college, Austin joined the Chinese Language Flagship Program, which is critical language program sponsored by the department of defense.  To this day, he still maintains his language through Chinese tutoring. 

Austin is fortunate to work with a small team who is helping him learn the investor trade.  They have taught him valuable lessons in investing and how to build relationships with a diverse variety of individuals.  Austin enjoys working with a broad array of companies and learning what makes companies successful.  With the pros, come the cons.  One of the cons is the work life balance.  Being an investor is a demanding job that is highly variable depending on your current engagement.  It could be tough to plan ahead with the unexpected projects.  Even though Austin enjoys working with the smaller teams he also mentioned that it can be a con, since much of the responsibility falls on your shoulders.

Social mobility is a strong motivator for Austin.  Austin grew up in a middle-class town in Indiana.  He saw glimpses of what was available out in the world for him.  He envisioned possibilities and set a goal at a young age to achieve them.  He would like his kids to have more than he did and strives to continue up the career ladder.  While living in Chine, COVID broke out.  The Department of Defense canceled the foreign language program he attended, and he had to return to the United States within 72 hours.  Since it was a quick move back and there wasn’t much time to prepare for it, Austin moved back in with his parents.  It hit his ego hard which was hard to overcome.  However, on the bright side he was able to spend more time with family and continue working remotely for his prior company in China.

Austin has multiple mentors.  He doesn’t want to single one person out as they have all have been helpful for him along they way.  Some have introduced him to the investment career.  They gave him a chance and experience, along with giving him the best investment tips and advice.  And others have been incredibility important to him in his personal life.  He is lucky and thankful to have so many different individuals help guide and mold him while he continues his successful path.  Some of the best advise he has received, and he would like to give is to build and nurture relationship over time.  No one like people that only like them when they need something.