How This Buyout Pioneer Built A Fortune From Private Equity To Soccer

Forbes

2 days ago

Lauren Leichtman wasn't always into soccer. That changed after she watched the 1999 Women's World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, where Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty kick for the U.S. women's national team—and her celebration, which included falling to her knees and ripping off her shirt, made front pages across the country.
Over the following years, she and her husband, Arthur Levine, who lived in Los Angeles, would often drive past the UCLA soccer field while picking up their daughter from school. They soon started donating to the university—including helping rebuild the soccer team's locker room—and struck up a friendship with the team's coach, Jill Ellis, who would go on to coach and win two World Cups with the U.S. women's team and then served as president of the National Women's Soccer League's San Diego Wave from 2021 until last December.
Leichtman's growing passion for soccer culminated in the couple's purchase of the Wave for an estimated $113 million last October. "We started looking at buying a women's sports team about three years ago," she says in a video interview from her home in Miami, with framed photos of her family displayed on a bookshelf behind her. 'It's something that interests us, it's a good investment, and it's something we can do together as a family.'
Two of her three kids are involved in supporting the team's management, and Leichtman and her family attend as many games as possible. In May, Alex Morgan—who won two World Cups with the U.S. women's national team and also captained the Wave until her retirement in 2024— joined the Wave as a minority investor.
Leichtman knows a thing or two about good investments. In 1984, she cofounded Beverly Hills, California-based private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners (LLCP) alongside her husband, investing in small businesses that needed money and targeting successful founders who had built companies with $30 million to $40 million in revenues. Over the next 40 years, the couple built their small wife-and-husband shop into an $11 billion (assets) buyout firm with blue-chip investors ranging from the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) to publicly-traded asset manager Hamilton Lane.
While they stepped back from day-to-day management in 2020, Leichtman and Levine still own the firm, which makes up the bulk of their fortunes. Add in their private investments, real estate and the San Diego Wave—the team is now worth an estimated $165 million—and Forbes estimates that Leichtman and Levine are each worth $1.3 billion, ranking Leichtman 26th on Forbes' 2025 list of America's Richest Self-Made Women.
Throughout the years, Leichtman and Levine have stuck to what they know best. They invest in businesses with positive cash flow. They look for experienced entrepreneurs and management teams who want to stay on to run the company and keep an ownership stake after the deal is closed. And they use a combination of debt and equity to ensure regular cash payments from interest on the debt.
"We created this strategy when we were doing this to find a way to fund our lifestyle without investing all our capital as equity," recalls Leichtman. 'We didn't have any other money, so we came up with the idea of investing a portion of the capital as a debt security and another portion as equity. At the time it was two-thirds debt and one-third equity, and the debt got a 13% cash coupon which was paid to us every month.'
Since they started raising money with outside investors in 1994, LLCP's funds have invested in more than 100 companies and sold investments in 80 of them for a total of $11.5 billion, compared to an aggregate investment cost in those sold businesses of $4.8 billion. That nearly 2.4 multiple of invested capital rivals those of private equity heavyweights from Blackstone to KKR. LLCP now has eight offices in five countries, including four in the U.S., and invests across three broad categories: middle-market U.S. companies with revenues from $50 million to $250 million, smaller U.S. firms with less than $50 million in revenues, and foreign—mostly European—companies with revenues around $30 million or higher. Some of its best-known investments include restaurant franchises Tropical Smoothie Cafe and Wetzel's Pretzels, but the firm has also scored big exits in industries ranging from pipe fittings to air quality control.
"They've got a great eye for finding these specific niche businesses that have a ton of potential and then matching up appropriate management to go do it," says Harley Kaplan, CEO of aerospace and defense component firm The Thermal Group, who previously led two LLCP portfolio companies as CEO.
Another key to their success has been their partnership. Levine, a former accountant, sourced deals and focused on their numbers, while Leichtman brought her expertise in law to help management at portfolio companies grow their business. "It's that combination of skills. They complement each other," says Kevin Fritzmeyer, who ran FlexXray, a company that provides x-ray inspection services for food safety, when it was owned by LLCP before it was sold in 2021. "Arthur's a salesman, he is going to be out front and getting things done, and [Lauren] is making sure that things stay between the lines."
From their wedding in 1979 to running the firm together and then investing through their family office, it's been a successful partnership. Says Levine of his wife's strengths: "It's her judgment and her rationality and calmness. I can get very excited about doing a deal and she doesn't. And that's why it's very important." She jumps in to add, "Arthur's extremely good on the numbers side. He can really see things that I just don't see, but it all has to work together. I'm seeing other things that he doesn't see."
Alex Morgan retired as the San Diego Wave's captain in October, the same month that Leichtman and Levine bought the team. Seven months later, Morgan joined as a minority investor. The team's value has already increased by 46%. "They're so undervalued, it seemed like a no brainer," says Levine of the investment.
Leichtman was born in Los Angeles in 1949. Her parents divorced when she was three years old. Her mother, a housewife, later remarried and Leichtman was raised in a mixed family of five stepchildren. When she was 10 years old, Leichtman remembers her mother telling her that she regretted never pursuing a career of her own.
"She was kind of trapped in, being supported by her husband," says Leichtman. "She had two kids when she divorced my father. So I just said, 'that's not going to happen to me. I have to be able to support myself.'"
She started working odd jobs at 14 and continued through her undergraduate years at the University of Colorado and Cal State Northridge, working as a file clerk, bank teller, waitress and cashier. In college, she wanted to become a psychologist, so after graduation she spent nine months as a residential counselor at a treatment center for emotionally disturbed kids, before moving to a community mental health center in South Central L.A. for six months. But Leichtman realized she wanted to pursue another career, so she applied to graduate school for law and architecture, and got into both.
'I was not that great with numbers, believe it or not," she says, laughing. "I was afraid if I built something it might fall down, so I went to law school. Basically, it was a crapshoot."
While she was studying law at Southwestern Law School in L.A., she met her future husband, Levine, at the University of California, Los Angeles' law library in 1975. At the time, the New York state native was working as an accountant and attending night classes for an MBA at UCLA.
"I did not want to get married until I knew I could support myself," says Leichtman. "He kept asking me, I kept saying no. Finally he gave up and said, 'just let me know when you want to get married.' Three months later, we got married."
After marrying in 1979, the couple then decamped for New York, where Leichtman got an advanced degree in securities law—an L.L.M—at Columbia and then worked in the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement division. Levine—who had by then gotten his MBA—attended law school at Columbia, but he kept traveling back-and-forth between L.A. and New York for his work at radio network Westwood One, which he had cofounded three years earlier. The firm was growing rapidly following then-President Ronald Reagan's deregulation of the radio industry in 1981, the same year the couple's first son was born in New York. In 1982, the pair moved back to L.A. so that Levine could focus on Westwood One.
Leichtman got a job at a law firm in Los Angeles, but after a year there she decided to leave. 'It was a horrible working environment for a woman," she says. "I had a little boy, I wanted to work part-time. They didn't want me to. It was just not good in a hundred ways."
She spent a year and a half practicing law on her own, helping lawyers with securities cases and depositions. Then in 1984, after helping take Westwood One public as its president, Levine decided to sell his shares in the firm and leave the company. (Between 1984 and 1986, he sold an estimated $10 million of stock, according to industry magazine Channels: The Business of Communications.) The couple then decided to start investing their money.
'I said, 'What are we going to do? He said, 'I don't know. We're going to figure it out as we go along.' And that's basically what we did," says Leichtman. Adds Levine: "We had no partners, no management fees, no nothing, just ourselves.'
Their first investment was in IDB Communications, a satellite transmission business that did live transmission of concerts around the world. When they sold it in 1987, they netted 150 times their initial investment. "I said, 'hey, this is an easy business, just give a guy money,'" says Levine, chuckling. "Then the stock market crashed.'
Their strategy of structured equity—a combination of debt and shares—was attractive to cash-strapped companies during the crisis. Business owners at the time, especially in hard-hit California, didn't want to give up too much equity, but needed financing. Their next deal was for software and video game developer The Software Toolworks, then chaired by radio announcer and TV host Les Crane, which produced the popular chess computer game Chessmaster 2000.
"They didn't want to sell equity. They really needed help. What we were doing was helping them professionalize their companies," says Leichtman. 'If they went to a private equity firm at that time for any kind of help, the firm would say, 'okay, we want 90% of your business.' So we were able to take 25% of the business and leave them with the rest. That's how we came up with the structure."
Photos, From Left: Daniela Amodei, Selena Gomez, Gwynne Shotwell. Illustration by Ben Kirchner for Forbes
In those early years, Leichtman sometimes faced pushback in an industry where few women rise to the top. "Initially, we'd have meetings with people who would come in and they would wait for Arthur to come in. Finally, a couple of years in, I just said, 'Look, Arthur's not coming in, so if you're interested in us investing in you, you should talk to me. Otherwise we can end the meeting right now,'" recalls Leichtman. As the firm grew in size and prominence and later raised funds from institutional investors, Leichtman's track record spoke for itself. "After that, it just got easier and easier."
By the early 1990s, they had made back 15 to 16 times their money on the seven deals they had invested in together. But they also started running into a problem where the companies they were investing in needed more capital than they could commit—and Levine was against bringing in third-party investors.
Then one night in 1993, while watching TV, they saw an announcement from the treasurer of California looking for companies willing to invest in the state. Levine and Leichtman reached out to her and applied to CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the U.S., for seed money to expand their firm and invest in more companies in the state. "We asked CalPERS for $100 million, thinking they'd give us $10 million to $25 million," recalls Levine. Adds Leichtman: "After nine months of due diligence, they gave us the hundred."
After their first fund did well, the couple raised a second fund in 1998, bringing in outside investors beyond CalPERS, including pension funds in Arizona and New York. Through downturns like the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, the couple honed in on 'recession-proof' businesses that returned a profit even during tough economic times.
"Our ability to grow our private equity firm had two components. One is our ability to return cash to our partners,' says Leichtman, recalling fundraising meetings in the early 2000s when she would often meet small pension funds in New England who told her that LLCP was the only firm returning any cash to them, thanks to its strategy of combining equity investments with debt. 'Also, our ability to compete with private equity funds and offering these new entrepreneurs who had just some sweat equity the ability to really have a meaningful piece of the company."
The deals came fast, with LLCP making successful exits from companies as diverse as fast-food franchise Quiznos and oil & gas pipe fittings manufacturer Hackney Ladish, which they sold for more than three times their investment in December 2008. That same year the firm raised its first billion dollar fund.
Since handing the reins of the firm to co-managing partners Michael Weinberg and Matthew Frankel in 2020, Leichtman and Levine have turned their focus to succession planning and managing their family office. Leichtman runs the San Diego wave as the team's governor and has also expanded the couple's philanthropy, focused in southern California. Among her most notable gifts is a $1 million pledge to Southwestern Law School, Leichtman's alma mater, to provide financial assistance for students interested in business and provide them with a mentor at LLCP. The pair have also donated to UCLA's soccer program and established two endowed chairs at the university—one for women's health research and the other for astrophysics, held by Andrea Ghez, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Leichtman and Levine haven't lost their eye for investing. They've put their own money into AI and robotics companies that are doing "extremely well," per Levine. But after four decades in private equity, Leichtman is enjoying bringing the couple's three kids into the family office and the family's charitable foundation. That's where she believes she can make a greater difference with the fruits of her success.
"We've been so fortunate. One of the first things we did was to call Planned Parenthood and UCLA and give them a million dollars to build a building they had asked for,' says Leichtman. 'I just feel like we don't need to buy another car or another painting. These are things that are really, really important."