ABOUT US

Phil Jemmett Chief Executive Officer

Phil brings over 35 years of business, financial, and real estate experience to Breakwater and is one of its Founding Members. Originally hailing from Australia where he worked in the mining industry and studied engineering, Phil moved to London to work with a non-profit and outreach organization. Subsequent to those pursuits, he moved to the US to pursue a degree in economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, eventually taking a position with Merrill Lynch in their brokerage department.

Phil then started his own import/export business which he ran successfully for over twenty years, traveling extensively throughout the world.  Through various investments and his wide-ranging business experience, Phil recognized what was quickly becoming a broad deep-seated crisis in the real estate and related credit markets. Recognizing the desperate need for capital, Phil then co-founded LJL Funding, a residential and commercial private lending firm. The successful development of LJL ultimately led to his founding Breakwater Equity Partners to provide commercial property owners with a comprehensive commercial loan workout solution to their real estate challenges. Phil currently resides in La Jolla, CA with his wife, Diane and has two grown sons.

• Phone: 858.490.3630
• Email: Phil@breakwaterequity.com

Samuel L. Brenner Business Development

Sam Brenner is an entrepreneur extraordinaire having started and successfully run multiple businesses over his long and storied career. Beginning with the marketing of specialty chemicals to the industrial and commercial markets in Ohio, he expanded his territory to include Florida's exploding hospitality industry.

His clients included Disney World and the most prestigious hotels and restaurants on Florida's Gold and Gulf Coasts. Looking to diversify his operations, he ventured into publishing, franchising and the manufacture and marketing of reverse osmosis desalination plants. It was not long before he set his sights on waste treatment technology, and in just a few years hired a team to operate ongoing waste treatment operations in the Caribbean.

At the same time he was systematically acquiring and managing an impressive real estate portfolio in Florida and Delaware. Now, working closely with Breakwater, Sam is in an excellent position to identify properties that are "underwater" and/or have serious lender issues and would clearly benefit from Breakwater's unique commercial loan workout expertise.

Armand Nicholi Chief Financial Officer

Armand brings over 22 years of venture capital, private equity and operational experience to Breakwater. Armand began his career with Berkshire Partners, a $6.5 billion leveraged buyout fund in Boston which specializes in later stage buyouts and recapitalizations. He then worked for Boston Capital Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm. That late and early stage finance experience subsequently led to various operational roles both as an entrepreneur running his own firm, and then as an executive helping to run various portfolio companies of the aforementioned investment firms with which he was affiliated.

Subsequent to the successful sale of those companies, Armand, along with two additional partners, founded Hatch Ventures in 2005. As Managing Partner of Hatch, he made numerous investments into various early-stage, consumer facing technology companies. Armand graduated from Harvard with a BA in Modern European History in 1987.