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When David Lazar tells potential clients "it's tough to be your own investment banker," he speaks from personal experience.
A little more than a year ago, he negotiated the sale of the financial services and industrial investment banking group practices of the Berwind Group, where he worked as managing director to his current employer, Boenning & Scattergood Inc., which is headquartered in West Conshohocken, Montgomery County.
The Berwind Group, which has offices in Center City Philadelphia and Bala Cynwyd, is a multi-industry (injection molding, specialty chemicals and real estate) global operation and one of Pennsylvania's largest family-owned businesses. (Founded in 1874 to mine Appalachian coal, the firm began leasing its mining operations in 1962 to fund investments in new ventures.)
Lazar, 45, considered several options when Berwind Industries decided to opt out of investment banking - a very small part of its $1.5 billion-a-year business and 7,500 employees.
In hindsight, Lazar says, he made the best decision he could have to sell to Boenning & Scattergood. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Lazar, who heads a division that has grown to 12 professionals at Boenning & Scattergood, says, "I think it's gone as well as I would have ever expected it to."
In the year since Lazar has been at Boenning & Scattergood, his group has closed or announced about a dozen transactions. "I think if you ask any other investment banking firms around they would admit that is a high number of transactions," he says. "Given the state of the market we're in, to do that many is quite a feat."
The transactions the investment-banking group of Boenning & Scattergood - which was a year old Nov. I - have recently completed are pretty evenly split between financial institutions and manufacturing and distribution companies, says...