A merger adviser’s assignment usually ends when the deal closes. Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher discovered in its first year that the client relationship often ended there too.
The firm opened on 55th Street in early 2000 as an M&A shop, founded by Frank and her team after they left Abernathy MacGregor. Its partners had to widen their skills almost at once.
The First-Year Problem
“You know what we learned in our first year? At the end of a deal, guess what happens if you’re only in M&A? You lose the client,” Joele Frank said.
Their fix was to give clients reasons to stay. Joele Frank and her partners added investor relations, public relations and activism defense, work that continues well after a transaction is announced and closed.
A Later Addition
Graphic and digital services came next. Many companies, Frank noted, don’t have the in-house resources for that work, so the firm built its own capacity and made it a key offering.
“When there are investor days involving major presentations, we do a lot of the slide deck work,” Frank said. “This type of work is a defining aspect of the identity of a company.”
The Firm That Resulted
Joele Frank has grown past 200 employees and 26 partners and now works from 22 Vanderbilt in New York and an office in San Francisco. Frank estimates that half to three-quarters of the partners came up through the firm.
“Many of our partners came to us right out of college and have come all the way up,” she said.
It still competes for M&A work against FGS Global, FTI Consulting and Kekst CNC, but deal work now shares the calendar with standing client relationships. The firm represented Sanara MedTech in its $350 million acquisition by MiMedx Group and advised Bitcoin Depot on its Chapter 11 filing. After eBay rejected an acquisition proposal from GameStop, it retained the firm as an adviser.
Frank knew the corporate side of investor relations before she knew the agency side. She spent years at AT&T, first in finance and then in investor relations, before learning financial PR at Adams & Rinehart.
Every service line feeds the same books. “We are independent owners with one P&L and that means everyone is equal in that environment,” Frank said.
“It’s really a team sport,” she said of the firm’s success. Frank has also said the firm’s product is credibility. For Joele Frank, helping a client keep it does not stop at the closing date.