Boutique corporate finance firms look for staff
Corporate financiers twiddling their thumbs in London should consider heading for the boutiques of Italy.
Not for a spot of retail therapy, but to assist with the consolidation of Italian mid-market companies.
"We can't get enough people", says Andrew Pawley of Arietti & Partners, a leading boutique in Milan. "We have had a large increase in our workload over the past 12 months. We're all working 7 day weeks and we can't go on indefinitely."
Alberto Gavazzi, a headhunter at Russell Reynolds in Milan, confirms that smaller Italian players are recruiting. Leading Italian boutiques include Euromobiliare, Meliorbanca, Banca Intermobiliare, Arca Merchant and Tamburi and Associates. Most are doing well, says Gavazzi.
Their activity follows a change in investors' traditional perception of Italy as politically and economically unstable. Pawley says that a more settled political scene and the arrival of the euro mean these risks have all but disappeared. International investors are now queuing to do business and there is a lot of it to be done.
"The mid-market in Italy is very family owned and unconsolidated," says Pawley. "The consolidation that is about to take place in Italy happened more than 20 years ago in the UK."
Hiring is by no means indiscriminate. Pawley is distinctly fussy. He is looking for people that are at least bi-lingual in Italian and English, and preferably trilingual. They should be used to juggling a heavy workload and will probably have worked in a senior role in an investment banking or consultancy environment.
MBA students are a possibility they must be discreet, highly numerate, and able to walk into a meeting of successful Italian entrepreneurs and command respect. International experience is an advantage and Italian nationality is certainly not necessary. Pawley, for example, has just hired an Irish candidate.
Elsewhere in Europe some other corporate finance boutiques are also hiring, albeit not often as voraciously. Cavendish Corporate Finance in London, for example, is understood to be looking for chartered accountants with a corporate finance background.
Andreas Weig, a headhunter at Korn/Ferry in Frankfurt, says German boutiques such as Drueker & Co., Doertenbach & Co, Peters & Associates and Fuchs Consult, are doing well and hiring selectively.
However, German nationality is a generally a requirement for employment in a German boutique. Weig says most successful candidates are Germans with several years' international experience.
Not all boutiques are scooping up the windfall of redundant corporate financiers who have fallen out of larger firms. Tim Lyle, managing director of Tenon Livingstone Guarantee in the UK says it is not hiring at all. One London-based headhunter says that after two years of lumpy corporate finance income, many boutiques are struggling.
