Lehman Brothers may have gone bankrupt, but some former employees are landing on their feet. Where there is crisis, there can also be opportunity.
Ever wonder what happened to executives from the now bankrupt investment company Lehman Brothers?
Some of them have started their own firms to focus on getting toxic assets resolved and managed, says a recent CNN Money/Fortune article.
Kevin White, a former leader of Lehman’s global structured finance group, had a hand in creating the kind of debt products that contributed to the demise of the financial markets and Lehman Brothers itself.
White started his own firm, Spring Hill Capital Partners, post-Lehman, and is working on resolving the kind of balance-sheet issues that products like credit default swaps and other high-risk securities have caused.
“The securitization process locked a lot of assets into mortgage-backed securities or CDOs,” says White. “As the underlying collateral ran into trouble, the complexity of securitizations has paralyzed investors, lenders, and borrowers. But we made a lot of these products, and we’re skilled at taking them apart, valuing them, and in some cases restructuring them.”
White — who sees Spring Hill as embodying the best traditions of investment banking, acting as an adviser and broker rather than taking big risks like a hedge fund — wasted no time in setting up shop.
Lehman filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. White formed Spring Hill on Sept. 17 and transported a handful of Lehman refugees into new offices the next day. By Oct. 15 the phones were ringing.
Now the company, which has 20 employees, mostly from Lehman, is cash-flow positive and able to pay salaries and other expenses, which for months had been coming out of White’s own pocket.
White is not the only Lehman alum to begin a new venture after its demise. Many of them started their own firms with their own specialities, and some are employing other ex-Lehman employees.
That’s good news for financial-services workers whose professional reputations have been scarred by their association with failed banks, insurance companies and lending firms that were overly entrenched in high-risk markets. You can come out of this as a problem solver, and you can find success — though perhaps not with the same bonuses, incentives and perks as we’ve seen during the financial bubble.
Did you work for a company plagued by financial scandal?
In the Career-line post “How to Manage a Company Scandal on Your Resume,” experts advise that while you can’t totally hide where you worked — it’s inevitably going to come up — you can minimize the impact on your resume by not leading with the firm’s name but with your accomplishments and metric-driven results. Focus on what it takes to get an interview, and be prepared to talk about being blindsided by the news of your former company’s demise.
[Image by vibesnyc via Flickr CC 2.0]
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