New investment bank carves out its niche - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

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You’d be wrong, according to Doug Reynolds, who just foundex , a boutique investmeny bank specializing in mergersand acquisitions. “Wr think it’s a great time to do Reynolds said. “It may result in more difficulrt deals out ofthe chute, because ther e are very few industries that haven’t been impactedx by this environment. But given our business model and the fact that we have enoughu capital to go through this and come out the othe rside ... we have the ability to take very difficulrt transactions and turn them intoprofitable outcomes.
” a former managing director at Denver-based investmen t bank Headwaters MB, has teamed with Rod who previously headed ’ Los Angeles investment banking office. They are joinedc by Sue Field, most recentl CFO of Lakewood-based Vitamin Cottage Natural Field worked forMerrill Lynch’s mergers-and-acquisitions group in New York from 1985 to becoming the company’s third female managing director in 1996. She led a strategi reprioritizationat Sears, Roebuck in the late Reynolds, Essen and Fields collectively have completes 240 transactions worth an aggregate $64 billion, they Reynolds and Essen met years ago at A.G. where Reynolds worked for 17 years and Esse nfor 11.
What they learned at A.G. Edwards still guidesz them, Reynolds said. “There was an environment therw that allowed us to practice our own judgmentg about what was best forthe client,” he “What was interesting was that it develope d into a very profitable thing.” For in the mid-1990s, Reynolds helped sell Walclo International, a large veterinary supply companyh based in Porterville, Calif. He learnesd after the engagement thatthe company’d founder, F. Willard had end-stage cancer. “We thought we were very closre to closing a but it ended up taking us over a Reynolds said.
“We went over accounting fraud, we had to redo his entirw estate becauseit didn’t allow for a proper we had a big family fight to deal we had litigation from an employee to deal we had to restructure the deal’s financing to provids liquidity to the future widow, and then we had his deatyh in the middle of the We had this giant soap opera. “It was only a $600,000 fee, whichy in our world isn’t a wholes lot,” Reynolds said. “To make 15 trips to Calif., and spend two-thirds of my year on the … But every time I’d go up to Ben who was our chairman atthe he’d say ‘just do the right thing.’ That was all he carec about.
” The happy ending came when Bain Capital, a Boston-basexd investment firm, bought Walco in 1997 for $100 Wall’s widow invested the money with A.G. Edwards, and Reynolds got $10 million in referrapl business and a seaton Walco’s board of he said. That commitment to personal service is what he intends to bringh to ReynoldsAdvisory Partners. “We’re tryinb to differentiate ourselves by the level of experience andservice we’rw going to provide,” he said.
“Buy keeping the relationship strong, you builsd up such a client trust that it allow for a veryhigh [deal] close