Corporate Financial Advisory

The Internet Age and globalization have spawned a 24/7/365 business cycle and changed the way investment and commercial banks interact with companies which need access to capital markets.

Relationship banking, the time-honored process whereby a banker courts a business and learns its complexities from the ground up, has all but vanished in the frenetic world of transactional deal making.

Today, senior bankers show up in board rooms to make the key new business pitch and then quickly hand off deal execution to smart, able young capital markets practitioners who are securities markets savvy but lack the ability to relate to C-suite executives and the board of directors pricing committee.

The result is all too often a hurry-up deal execution where the deal becomes the client, and the client is left to watch the transaction from a “safe” distance. At the precise moment when judgment and experience should trump technical expertise, the senior banker (“rainmaker”) who won the mandate is likely to be far afield making yet another new business pitch.

Giving corporate financial advice and counsel, acquired from years of hands-on deal making, is an art not a science. It is a rare deal that proceeds elegantly from idea to incubation to completion. Management of issuer client expectations is a critical, but often ignored, element in the public offering / private placement / M&A process.

CEOs increasingly find comfort having a trusted confidant (whose fee is not dependent upon a transaction) at their side during the many stressful moments of a banking transaction… an interpreter who speaks investment banking.

Corporate insiders understandably struggle to deliver bad news to CEOs for fear of jeopardizing their own employment status. South Beach Capital has no such impediment. Our independence allows us to offer unfettered, unvarnished advice to CEOs, CFOs and boards of directors whom the deal making process all too often orphans. Playing the role of devil’s advocate, we tell clients what we think rather than what we think clients want to hear.

Bruce Foerster, founder and president of South Beach Capital, and his associate Chuck Ranson have “seen the movie before”… while the characters may change, the plot rarely does. He brings both requisite deal making experience and mature judgment (the “adult in the room”) to a corporate financial advisory engagement.