When Legacy Group decided to make a modest entry into the Colombian Coffee business in 2017, they quickly discovered they were thinking too small.
“At first we were looking to pay cash flow,” Josh Ziegelbaum, Director of Investor Relations for the fast-growing alternative investment fund, told Michael Duncan of The Road to Financial Freedom Podcast, “so it was a cash flow oriented agricultural investment when we did the seed funding round back in 2018.”
Fast forward to today. The resulting US-based company, Green Coffee Company, has become the largest producer of Colombian coffee in the world, with over 1,000 employees in the US and Colombia.
“Our initial acquisitions were just 600 acres,” he said. “We’ve grown to be more than ten times that today with over 6,600. And, you know, it’s grown to be a massive growth investment opportunity.”
Self-directed IRAs, like those in the custody of CamaPlan, don’t make up a huge portion of their investor pie, but Ziegelbaum would like to change that. Retirement funds are perfect for the kind of explosive growth Legacy Group targets, due to their insulation from taxation.
“The projected return profile on a Series C investment in Green Coffee Company is 64% IRR,” Zielgelbaum said. “We’re an 11 net equity multiple. So what we’re telling our investors and modeling for them in our financial model is on a hundred thousand dollars minimum investment, we’re forecasting a seven-figure exit.”
That’s fantastic … but it’s even more fantastic if the tax bite isn’t too big.
“If you could do that in a tax-deferred manner or a tax-efficient manner, [it] makes a lot of sense.”
But it’s not just about money. Legacy Group is an “impact investment” fund, concerned not just with the bottom line but on doing the right thing — for employees and for the planet.
This includes what in the US we call “fair employment practices” — practices that are sadly rare across Latin America.
“We provide the majority of our employees with pensions,” Ziegelbaum said, “which is historically very low in the industry. We [offer] paid time off if people get hurt … It sounds normal, but I could tell you that unfortunately, in Colombian coffee or agriculture, it’s just not the case. So we’re formalizing employment and really lifting up the communities where we operate.”
