Best Consumer Retail Groups?

Current sophomore currently recruiting for IB. I’m curious to know what some of the best groups on the street are for Consumer Retail M&A? Heard good things about the obvious banks (GS, JPM) but any others? Any info on Financo or Blair’s group?

26 Comments
 

A lot of people’s titles on here are fake as there’s no verification. 

 

bofa is top at senior level and in terms of dealflow but keep in mind the modeling is generally outsourced to the m&a team if that’s important to you

 

Financo is now part of RJ and is filled with a bunch of Wharton people. When I interviewed with them, the technical portions were surprisingly intense. They do a lot of interesting deals in the space and have an emphasis on why C&R during their screening process too. MDs were really experienced in their respective verticals.

 

Can confirm that Financo's interviews can be pretty challenging. I have been told that they will interview a ton of kids at a superdays for only a couple spots. I think some people come in thinking they are just interviewing at RJ and get smoked by the Wharton guys.

 

In 2023 the Consumer deals that Evercore did were:

SunOpta sale to Nature's Touch - 141$ Million

Mellisa & Doug to Spin Master - 950$ Million

Sovos Brand to Campbell Soup - 2.7 Billion

Bang to Monster Energy - $360 Million

Post Holdings & Smuckers - 1.2 Billion

So 5 deals that vary greatly is size. Probably not a bad group to be apart of get some headliner deals but definitely not the greatest just from looking at past deals. 

 

Not a conclusive list but:

of Sell-Side M&A Deals 2023


Houlihan - a lot 50 ish
CVP - 20
Lazard - 30+
*GS - 25 (under 1B$)
*UBS - 23 (under 1B$)
Financo (RJ) -24
William Balir -17
Guggenheim- 2
Moelis - 8
Baird - 7
PWP - 5
* data from LSEG and company reports

Lazard has a lot because they do both MM and higher types of transactions globally. Guggenheim very little M&A in the group.

 

As someone else mentioned, Financo (now with Raymond James), is good.  They have one of the best MD's in beauty/personal care/DTC companies.  More MM focused I think, but they win a lot of mandates.  CVP and GS are usually going to be in the conversation on larger deals.  Blair Effron has been a part of many blue-chip consumer deals, not sure of his involvement today, but have worked alongside CVP before on the consumer side and their team was solid.  Evercore historically had a great C&R team as well.

 

Second this one. Financo sees almost every beauty deal and is also strong across consumer in general. Definitely a good group to be apart of heard the culture is solid too. Big Wharton pipeline so hope you go there OP.

 

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