CEO & White Oak Commercial Finance Head
White Oak Europe
Tom Otte has spent his more than 40-year career in asset-based lending building highly successful businesses in the U.S. and internationally, and he’s still going full speed ahead today.
Tom Otte has been a part of the asset-based lending industry for more than 40 years, starting with his days in banking in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, continuing to his more than two decades building businesses for GE Capital and his current role as CEO of White Oak Commercial Finance and head of White Oak Europe. With such a storied track record, Otte has seen just about everything the world of ABL has to offer, but it’s some of its most basic principles that have kept him in the industry for so many years.
“What I’ve always liked about asset-based lending is it’s more entrepreneurial. Everyone can build an asset-based lending business. If you have capital, you can build one, if you do it right,” Otte says. “Asset-based lending is more about understanding how a company makes money, whether it has a reason to exist and how can you help them grow.”
Constructing Businesses
Growth has been a central tenant of Otte’s career. After learning the ins and outs of ABL in the ‘80s during his banking days, he eventually joined GE Capital and in 1988, got his first opportunity to build a business, as he helped the financial services giant launch its ABL group, which would become GE Capital Commercial Finance. As a leader within the division, Otte helped build GE Capital Commercial Finance into a $7 billion organization, but that was only the first successful business he’d help build with GE.
In 1994, just as the Mexican peso crisis kicked off with the devaluation of the nation’s currency, GE Capital decided to enter the marketplace, assigning Otte the task of launching and building a leasing, commercial estate and factoring division in Mexico.
Over the next four years, Otte would leverage GE’s massive balance sheet to build a $1.5 billion commercial finance business in Mexico, before returning to the U.S. to oversee and build several other outfits, including a small-ticket ABL shop and a factoring business.
Eventually, Otte would step away from GE Capital, joining up with multi-billion-dollar hedge fund Dune Capital, where he once again played a role in creating new businesses, including Dune Aviation and Dune Rx, all while getting a first-hand education in esoteric assets and building businesses with fund money.
Otte couldn’t stay away from ABL forever, though, and that’s what led him to join White Oak Global Advisors to launch and grow its ABL arm, White Oak Commercial Finance. In the entity’s first year, it closed a $75 million deal, marking an important and, if you ask Otte, essential milestone on its growth trajectory.
“Scale is the first hurdle. You need to cover expenses while providing good returns to investors,” Otte says. “Your first deal is the hardest and it better be right because if you don’t get it right the first time, you’re done.”
Heading West
Since that first deal, which has served as a template of for how White Oak completes transactions, Otte has navigated the company through the other important steps of building a business, which he describes as hiring people who can handle multiple roles, building infrastructure and processes, becoming profitable and scaling via acquisition. During this journey, Otte has gotten back to what he loves about ABL.
“At GE Capital, I moved too far away from the revenue line. I was more of an approver and a paper pusher rather than somebody who would actually structure things,” Otte says. “Getting back to getting my hands dirty was a good thing.”
Otte makes a concerted effort to truly understand his employees’ experiences, as he says business leaders should “never ask anybody to do anything you haven’t done.” Otte doubles down on such a leadership philosophy by priding himself on always being available while trying to boost morale whenever possible.
“If you get on phone calls with me, you will hear me laugh a lot. If you don’t laugh or have a good time at work, then you’re probably not enjoying what you do,” Otte says. “I like to have people that work with us get a speeding ticket on the way to work vs. getting a speeding ticket on the way home.”
Otte is also serious about passing knowledge on to colleagues; he preaches that “time kills all deals,” that “there’s no such thing as a bad phone call” and that “thinking outside of the box is not risky if you structure properly.” Staying true to these and other core principals he’s cultivated over a highly successful career in ABL are crucial to Otte’s future plans.
“I’m not gone yet. Maybe that’s my legacy today,” Otte says. “I want to leave a business like White Oak Commercial Finance in good hands, heading west at a strong speed.”
