restructuring
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Lazard sells the second opinion
It began by selling cloth. Now Lazard sells judgment on mergers, debt and investments. Its next bet is a $575 million expansion into private capital advice.
Ken Moelis and the art of starting over
He left UBS in 2007 to build a bank around advice. A financial crisis, a public listing and a change of CEO later, Ken Moelis is still working on the harder part: making a personal business last.
PJT Partners sells judgment. The bill is $1.71 billion.
A bank built around advice has found business in both dealmaking and distress. PJT Partners shows what happens when the people, rather than the balance sheet, become the product.
Neil Aaronson and the value of staying in the game
He chose finance after law school, returned to Chicago for family, and took charge of Hilco’s real estate business. Now Neil Aaronson is helping a collection of specialists work together on a larger stage.
Skip McGee and the size of a banking life
He left a broad banking job to build an energy specialist, one Houston breakfast at a time. Eleven years later, Intrepid’s advisory business has a new home - and his career has another turn.
Jack Neumark and the price of being wrong
Before he became co-CEO of Fortress, Jack Neumark built a business around legal uncertainty. His career follows a deceptively simple question: what happens to your money when the story changes?
The Firm You Call When the Sentence Cannot Be Wrong
Kekst CNC sells something hard to put on a rate card: judgment when a company has one chance to explain itself. Its history begins with an accidental niche, a client the founder refused to defend, and a merger two decades in the making.
Teneo Built a Company for the Phone Call No CEO Wants
A communications boutique became a 1,800-person advisory machine by buying the specialists executives need when reputation, capital, risk and leadership collide. Its hardest assignment arrived when the crisis was its own.
The Bankruptcy Lawyer Who Learned That Silence Has a Balance Sheet
C Street began with a broad promise and found its edge in a very narrow room: the room where lawyers, lenders and nervous executives decide what everyone else will hear. Its rise is a case study in turning lived expertise into a category of one.
The Company That Gets Paid When Everyone Else Gives Up
Founded on the wreckage of a family business, Hilco Global built a $1 billion enterprise by answering one unglamorous question better than anyone: what is this stuff really worth?
The Firm That Buys Companies Nobody Wants - and a Football Club Everybody Watches
Clearlake turned a distressed-debt strategy into a $90 billion machine by fixing unglamorous companies - then bought a Premier League club to prove the point.
Jefferies
How a 1962 Los Angeles block-trading desk turned into the last independent full-service investment bank standing between the boutiques and the giants.
Larry Nusbaum
Larry Nusbaum is a consumer-products and retail turnaround executive who serves as President and Chief Marketing Officer of Work 'N Gear, the Mid-Atlantic and New England workwear, footwear and healthcare-apparel chain, and as an operating partner at Dark Alpha Capital. Over two decades he has run companies as CEO, CMO and COO across housewares, electronics, personal care, apparel and fitness, most visibly at Ronco, the Ron Popeil gadget brand he bought out of bankruptcy with Marlin Equity Partners in 2007 and steered from a reported $7.5 million annual loss to roughly $4 million in profit on about $30 million of 2009 sales. He has also led Midwest Trading Group, where he acquired the phone-accessory brand TYLT in December 2023, and restructured the artisan-goods company GlobeIn into a subscription model. At Work 'N Gear he took a 25-year-old, roughly $40 million retailer through a 2025 Chapter 11 filing, a DIP financing, a shrink from 38 stores to 26, and a April 2026 asset sale to a family-office-backed operator that repaid the lender in full and set up a relaunch of the e-commerce platform and up to ten stores.
9fin
9fin is a London-based, AI-native intelligence platform for the global debt markets. Founded in 2016 by former banker Steven Hunter and former engineer Huss El-Sheikh, it uses machine learning to extract structured data from dense financial documents and pairs that data with news, analytics, and AI-powered workflows. Its platform covers leveraged loans, high-yield bonds, distressed debt, CLOs, private credit, and asset-based finance, and is used by investment banks, asset managers, hedge funds, law firms, and advisors. In March 2026 the company raised a $170M Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation.