First, We Need to Read You Your Rights - Trying to Make this Blog (and Site) More Useful to You

We Don't Do Sterile.  You have probably noticed that the websites of investment banks and securities firms are relatively sparse and sterile in content, primarily facts and data that are citable to external referents, tombstone announcements of transactions completed, sometimes a list of personnel, sometimes not.  You definitely won't find anything that amounts to a point of view.  That is primarily because, in the securities industry, the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's enveloping and highly restrictive dome of regulation includes communications with the public by form and content.  Big firms with hundreds and thousands of employees establish very restrictive content publishing guidelines to avoid inadvertently running afoul of the regulators.  Sterility, and but modest utility to website visitors, are the tradeoffs for assured compliance.  The big firms would need multi-layered, multi-filtered editorial approval boards to publish more interesting things, even in a blog.  If the business does not need this, why bother?  What I'm going to do is a little different.  I am going to attempt to be more useful to you.  I will invest the time and effort to teach you about investment banking topics and still comply with the regs.

We Can Rant - We Just Need to Tell You When We Are. When communicating with the public, I must present a balanced view and disclose the risks of acting upon what I share, particularly if I am trying to sell you something. I can't just spout off like so, so many other "content creators" – unless I tell you I'm selling (or ranting) and the risk of buying what I'm selling or acting upon my rant. But I do want to tell you what I've seen about how things work in the M&A world without sterilizing the content. You can get that from a textbook. You can get the down-and-dirty version from a journalist or former banker, who gets more attention by emphasizing the underbelly and the peccadillos – not the mainstream relevant to those of you accountable for results now.  The regs have an exception for me educating you about the market and telling you about things I have seen, good, bad, and ugly. That is what I intend to do here. It's not about selling you something. I mean this to be educational.

The Long-Term Perspective of One Participant-Observer. Nevertheless, I will caution you as if it were not evident to a reasonable person. I publish this collection based on my observation in the investment banking industry over 32 years as a FINRA-registered investment banker, all of it on the front line of deal-doing, most of it as Managing Partner (and Chief Compliance Officer) of an SEC/FINRA-registered and licensed private investment bank. Others can and will have statements different than mine. I am reporting from what I have seen and the generalizations that guide me in my work. If some person or group comes out looking good, or vice versa, that is an artifact of the data, not my intent. Anyone else can communicate countervailing information. I will assess its credibility based on whether the observations are first-hand from a front-line deal-managing role of equivalent or longer duration. You can determine credibility any way you want.

What. Who. How. I'm Michael Kane. I've been an investment banker for 32 years. I strategize, structure, negotiate and close the sale of your company, mergers, acquisitions, and IPOs, and provide Board Advisory on strategic alternatives and Restructuring if things aren't going well. I collaborate with company owners, senior management, board directors, private equity staff, top-flight lawyers, and accountants. If you are in one of these roles and want to master what you are about to do for your stakeholders, my mission is to help you significantly improve your results. You can engage our firm to lead your transaction or, on a more limited basis, coach you through difficult issues or take a video course from our growing list of orientations to various types of deals. I'm also doing a series of blog posts on things I've seen happen, some funny, some not so much. Occasionally I'll contribute a dose of reality to clarify simple assertions and sound bites about how things work in the M&A world.  That's what I'm doing with this blog.  And now, back to our scheduled programming.