With a high school degree at age 15, a college degree at 19, and a Harvard MBA at 22, media banker Lisbeth Barron got an early start on Wall Street. But after more than 20 years in the business and 11 years at Bear Stearns before its implosion, she wasn’t just looking for a place to land. She was looking for a place to spend the rest of her career, Barron tells Deal Journal.
After interviewing at a number at a number of commercial banks and investment banks, Barron didn’t find herself moved by the idea of working at a bank with a big balance sheet, especially given the troubles with the markets right now. She chose advisory boutique Centerview Partners, which she found to be the closest match to Bear’s investment banking business: focused on deals valued at less than $1 billion and on giving mergers and stock advice. Centerview has a broker-dealer license that allows the bankers there to provide advice on capital-raisings and steer clients to bigger banks when it comes time to actually sell the shares. Barron wanted the familiar environment of the middle market as well as a boutique. “It’s this passionate drive to almost conduct yourself as if you’re an insider rather than an agent,†she said. Of course the world is dotted with advisory-focused firms, such as Lazard, Evercore Partners, Greenhill and Perella Weinberg, and the landscape is competitive. Barron said she had faith in Centerview’s $200 billion of announced deal volume in the past two years.
After Harvard Business School, Barron was hired by former star analyst Manny Gerard (a co-founder of Gerard Klauer Mattison) who was then at Warner Communications. After a couple of years, Barron joined SG Warburg, where she eventually earned an Institutional Investor ranking and ran the entertainment research group while peppering the sector with “sell†recommendations. “It was quite a boost to my career on the time. They were the right call and money managers were surprised to see a sell,†she said. Naturally, there was pushback: “You are never the friend of the management teams or boards of directors when you take negative approaches to them. That’s why you have to be absolutely certain you’re right when you’re making those calls.†Her record earned her a call from Swiss Bank Corp., where she then worked until SBC bought Warburg. Bear Stearns investment banker Alan Schwartz brought her over to Bear to March 1997.
At Bear, Barron earned a relationship as a deal closer who consistently finished the deals she started. She advised Univision on a passel of deals and advised media magnate Robert Sillerman on several deals, including the sale of SFX entertainment to Clear Channel Communications in 2000 and the acquisition of American Idol owner 19 Entertainment.
As for her current gig, Barron noted that consolidation is going to hit the media sectors, which include TV, music publishing, Broadway theaters, Vegas gambling and merchandising. She expects music publishing companies to be acquired by bigger rivals or private-equity firms, especially overseas. Other candidates for mergers to come include U.S. movie-theater chains and some of the content companies that want to build ticket and touring events around their properties.
Bear’s demise has lured banks with even modest merger advice efforts to pick up some talent. U.K. bank Barclays, which is heavily focused on capital markets financing, hired a team of ex-Bear Stearns bankers to fill out its health-care advisory effort in the U.S. They include new head of health-care coverage W. Patrick McMullan III, and managing directors Ben Adams, Kevin Clarke and Frank Williams.
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