When Eric Rosenfeld isn’t railing against poorly governed companies, he turns to his other passion: singing. The 48-year-old founder of aptly named investment firm Crescendo Partners has paid his way onto the Broadway stage, via a charity auction, for one-off performances in Miss Saigon and Rent, and he’s known to break into song at a moment’s notice.
Last month Rosenfeld took his act to the Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York’s Time Warner Center for a value-investing confab hosted by activist fund T2 Partners. Following a 15-minute video presentation on his battle with SPAR Aerospace, a Canadian company that was sold to L-3 Communications in 2002, Rosenfeld treated the crowd of 500 to a miniature musical revue featuring his investment-themed rewrites of well-known show tunes.
Rosenfeld’s opening number, “Institutional Investor,” was sung to the ragtime-tinged “Mister Cellophane” from Chicago. The baritone concluded with “I, Eric New Yorker,” a derivative of “I, Don Quixote,” the title song from Man of La Mancha:
I am I, Eric New Yorker
The head of Crescendo
Destroyer of evil, am I
I will march to the sound of the
trumpets of profit
Forever to conquer or die
“I wanted to add a touch of humor, levity and entertainment to the conference,” says Rosenfeld, who ran the arbitrage desk at brokerage firm Oppenheimer & Co. before founding Crescendo in 2003.
He certainly got the audience’s attention.
“He was great, really talented,” says Whitney Tilson, founder of T2. “But everyone in the audience was shocked.”
Rosenfeld has been shocking corporate managers too. In September he launched a proxy fight for a seat on the board of Geac Computer. His goal: to persuade the company to consider a sale. He got his wish on November 7, when private equity firm Golden Gate Capital announced a $1 billion buyout of Geac, sending its shares up 23.5 percent. Trumpets of profit indeed.
