Industry and Market Expertise

Advisory and Investment Banking Firm

Blum & Co., Inc. Strategic Financial Advisory Services

A private strategic advisory and investment banking firm founded in 1988, Blum & Co., Inc. provides:

  • Insightful, in-depth advice based on substantive industry and market expertise and major CEO and Board of Directors experience
  • Wall Street advisory, divestiture, financing, and transaction experience, expertise, and quality with:
  • Responsiveness
  • Strategic perspective, combined with
  • In-depth expertise in specialty business areas
  • Creativity and persistence in achieving client objectives
  • Independent objectivity
  • Strong relationships

Market Expertise

Blum & Co. brings in-depth insights, experience, and expertise to its advisory and financing work in selected business areas. These specialty areas include:

  • High Technology (including software, semiconductor manufacture and capital equipment, computers and computer systems and networks, including outsourcing, and the Internet)
  • Communications and Information Systems and Services (including wireless and conventional systems; radio, television, and cable programming, broadcasting, and distribution; infrastructure, including cable, fiber optics, and wireless; computer systems; and Internet, CRM, multimedia, and related services)
  • Defense and Other Government Contract Services
  • Energy and Natural Resources (including oil and gas, coal, mining, electric, and gas utility companies and projects)
  • Project Development and Financing (and other off-balance sheet financing)
  • Chemicals and Synthetic Materials
  • Security (including physical, operational, and information security)
  • Health Care Products and Services (including biotechnology)
  • Environmental Management and Remediation
  • Financial Services
  • Manufacturing (including aerospace and aviation)
  • High-Value Professional Services (including IT services, engineering services, and graphic arts)
  • Transportation

In these areas, Blum & Co. has hands-on experience and in-depth knowledge that enable us to understand each client's business in detail and add considerable strategic value in addition to our investment banking expertise.

Strategic and Financial Advice

Blum & Co. offers independent, objective strategic and financial advice based on close working relationships with its clients. Blum & Co. is customer-oriented and advises and acts on opportunities from the perspective of its clients' long-term interests.

We provide the full range of merger, acquisition, sale, and divestiture advice and the active management of the complex process required to buy and/or sell assets, subsidiaries, or entire companies. Our skills are sharp both from long experience in this business and from numerous recent successful transactions.

We actively guide clients through the intricacies of divesting holdings they no longer wish to own, guiding and, where appropriate, managing the entire process from strategic analysis of just what to sell and how to sell it, to making sure the check clears at closing.

Our experience enables us to succeed even where many others fail – in selling complex or difficult companies, where particular expertise is required to understand the value in what is being sold, to package that value, to recognize who might pay the most for that value, and to conduct the sale process in a way that attracts the right buyer and the right price.

The key is our rare combination of substantive expertise and process experience. We not only know how things should be done, but why and when they should be done differently.

As a result, some of our advice is more subtle, based on increasing value as well as realizing value through detailed knowledge of particular industries, markets, and trends, e.g., the best ways to strengthen a company's lines of business in the U.S. and abroad:

  • If those ways include joint ventures or other alliances, how to identify and develop the best partners and alliance structures, and how best to make the enterprise perform well
  • If those ways include mergers or other combinations, such as acquisitions, how to find and buy the best targets

A key element of advice in acquisitions, divestitures, mergers, joint ventures, and financings is expert valuation. We provide advice on valuations for both publicly and privately held companies, divisions, and securities — for acquirers, sellers, and for equity-related financings. Our advice helps provide a sound basis for resolving controversies concerning the valuation of corporations, partnerships, and such intangible assets as technology and marketing rights.

Strategic Advisory Services

Some advice is highly sophisticated and complex, affecting the very life of the company and its owners and management. For example, based on its substantive expertise, Blum & Co. helps clients answer the following critical questions and then act on the answers to achieve results:

Should the entire company, a subsidiary, or a major portion of assets be sold, and if so, what might it bring? How can it be sold to get the best price with the utmost confidentiality and the least disruption?

Management wishes to buy the company or a division it runs. Can a management buyout be done? And if so, how quickly, at what price, and on what terms? Can a structure be developed that will be acceptable to the Board or the parent and also be financeable? How best can financing be arranged? What are the risks involved, and how can they be handled or mitigated?

A company's current owners and its management are interested in forming an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and having the ESOP purchase a significant portion of the current owners' stock. Is such a transaction feasible? If so, how should it be structured to achieve both the best returns for the current owners and to provide the best results for the employees commensurate with the level of risk the management and employees are willing to assume? How can the important technical details best be structured and negotiated to work effectively at a reasonable cost?

A public company is concerned about its vulnerability to takeover. Is it vulnerable? If so, can effective defenses be put in place ahead of time, and which defenses are most appropriate to the company and most likely to be sustained? If a hostile takeover looms imminently, what defenses can be mounted under fire, at the very least, to raise the stock price substantially? How can they best be put in place, and what might they achieve?

A public company is concerned that the advantages it sought in going public are now mostly inaccessible and are now outweighed by the costs and complexities of being public, including D&O insurance, top management and directors' personal liabilities, '34 Act filings, compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, Regulation FD, and other new Federal and state requirements, etc. How feasible would it be to "go private"? What financing would be required, can it be obtained, and what would it cost and entail? What are the risks of unintended sale or takeover, and how can these risks be minimized?

A company or project is experiencing financial stormy weather. Can it be restructured financially to sail more smoothly? If so, how can the restructuring best be accomplished? How can the conflicting interests of senior creditors, subordinated lenders, shareholders, management, customers, suppliers, etc., be reconciled and a new financial structure formally, legally, and efficiently be put in place?

A company wishes to recapitalize the parent and/or one or more subsidiaries to accommodate the interests of different stakeholder segments, including founders, management and directors, previous investors, new investors, strategic partners, and lenders. How can the equity best be structured with different classes of preferred stock, classes of common stock (perhaps with different voting power per share), warrants, convertible debt, other subordinated debt with equity features, stock options, etc., to accommodate each of the various interests to the best extent possible?

A company requires international partners and non-recourse financing. Can the parts be put together to make it succeed? How can the roles of the various partners be defined to make the project development and operation proceed smoothly? Who would be the best partners? Can financing be obtained, and what contracts, approvals, assurances, guarantees, etc., must be obtained and put in place in order to secure financing? What financing terms and conditions can be achieved in U.S. or international markets today?

In these areas, Blum & Co.'s advice stems from extensive experience not only in providing such advice but also in successfully translating such advice into results. We work with the client to develop a suitable transaction, then we follow through to complete the transaction. Blum & Co. advises and executes. We get the deal done.

Financing

Blum & Co. provides clients access to capital through its capabilities in originating, structuring, and placing financing in a broad range of markets worldwide. We structure and place equity, debt, and hybrid financings — traditional, specialized or inventive, simple, or complex.

Blum & Co. also structures and arranges integrated financings involving multiple layers of debt and equity — in recapitalization, restructuring, project and related off-balance-sheet financing, and leveraged buyouts, including ESOP buyouts. Blum & Co. has particular experience and expertise in project financings, building on its partners' years leading numerous such financings for one of the world's largest investment banking firms.

Blum & Co.'s financings are arranged privately, usually with domestic and international corporations and/or institutional investors, including insurance companies, pension funds, banks, and specialized funds and financial organizations.

Where public equity or debt markets are the most appropriate, Blum & Co. advises and assists its clients in negotiating and arranging underwritings through its partners' extensive underwriting experience and outstanding contacts among the major and mid-size brokerage firms.

Blum & Co. has considerable expertise in helping issuers to examine the range of alternatives for their financings, choose the structures that best balance the issuer's needs and the capital markets at the time, and execute the financings effectively and efficiently.

A key strength is the extensive network Blum & Co. maintains of lenders and investors worldwide, whose changing interests and needs we know and on whom we can rely. This network includes, but is not limited to, domestic financial institutions, Asian and European institutions, and less traditional financing sources, such as corporate strategic partners, corporate investors, and specialized funds.

Where expanded contacts may be needed to reach particular sources, Blum & Co. does not hesitate to extend its reach by drawing upon relationships with numerous international merchant banks and specialized investment banks, working together to help achieve the financing its clients require.

Recent Investment Banking Transactions

The principals of Blum & Co. have a 22-year track record of many dozens of successful strategic advisory engagements and investment banking and related transactions, including several among the largest ever completed. These assignments have included:

  • Complex financial structuring and raising from $4 million to $2 billion of debt and equity;
  • Sophisticated in-depth sale advice and highly successful sole and co-management of sales of companies and divestitures of subsidiaries and divisions;
  • Full-breadth acquisition structuring and advice, ranging from straightforward identifying and negotiating with targets to fending off competing higher bids for public companies to hostile takeovers, all with very high closing success rates;
  • Provision of strategic financial advice for senior corporate managers and Boards of Directors, including the development of strategic plans for established companies and the formulation of plans for new enterprises and business segments. Our particular strengths in providing such strategic advice are (i) our detailed knowledge of the relevant markets and (ii) our in-depth expertise and experience in raising the money and closing the deals to implement the advice and make the results successful; and
  • ESOP ownership transitions, including partial purchases and buyouts by employees in private corporations and ESOP privatization of governmental units.

Management Team

Edward Blum
Reston

Robert Larson
Houston

Gene Spencer
Houston

Roger Neece
Reston

Michael Mendelevitz
Reston

James Duggan
Reston

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