The State of Investment Banking

Margaret Shanley is a principal in CohnReznick's Los Angeles office and is the National Director for the firm's Transaction Advisory Services practice. She has more than 20 years of professional experience assisting strategic and financial buyers and lenders in the performance of financial and business due diligence on platform, add-on acquisitions, and carve out transactions. She is a member of the Firm's Private Equity and Venture Capital Industry Practice.

She is known in the Los Angeles community as a go to partner in the middle market for transaction advisory services. During her career, Margaret has led hundreds of transactions and maximized successful outcomes for buyers and sellers. She is a connector and networker within the LA community, putting potential buyers and sellers in touch and helping to facilitate strategic relationships and introductions to other service providers.

Ed is responsible for setting the firm’s vision and developing the strategy to execute it. His highest priorities include creating a winning culture and recruiting great people to build the Intrepid team. In addition to firm management responsibilities, Ed’s duties include originating and managing merger and acquisition transactions. During an investment banking career spanning over three decades, he has led transaction teams in a variety of industry sectors, including consumer, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, industrials and business services. 

Prior to co-founding Intrepid, Ed was one of the Principal Partners who built Barrington Associates, a specialty investment bank, into one of the most respected middle-market M&A advisory firms in the United States. In 2006, Wells Fargo Securities acquired Barrington to serve as the M&A advisory platform of the bank. 

Lloyd Greif, a 41-year veteran of the investment banking wars, founded Greif & Co. in 1992 after a decade-plus career as Vice Chairman, Head of Investment Banking and top rainmaker for Sutro & Co., then the oldest investment banking firm in the West. Previously, Lloyd was a business operations and strategy consultant with Deloitte. He has spent his entire business career serving the merger & acquisition and corporate finance needs of entrepreneurs, spanning all industries.  Globally renowned as “The Entrepreneur’s Investment Bank,” Greif & Co. engineers 9- and 10-figure M&A transactions and 8- and 9-figure equity and debt financings for middle-market growth companies nationwide.

In addition to both serving entrepreneurs and being an entrepreneur himself, Lloyd’s philanthropy also extends to promoting entrepreneurship. In 1997, he founded the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at USC’s Marshall School of Business, a perennially Top 10-ranked program.  Lloyd is a graduate of all three major educational institutions in Los Angeles—UCLA (BA-Economics), USC (MBA) and Loyola Law School (JD). He brings his education and four decades of deal-making experience to bear to create value for clients through financial engineering, marketing skill and negotiations expertise.

Nishen Radia is a co-head of M&A at B. Riley Securities, a leading investment bank providing corporate finance, research, and sales and trading services. He has approximately 26 years of experience advising owners and stakeholders of middle-market companies on mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity recapitalizations and financial restructurings, including corporate bankruptcies.

Previously, Radia co-founded FocalPoint Partners, a successful boutique investment bank that grew to become one of the 10 largest investment banks operating in Los Angeles County, ranked by employee headcount. He has worked in investment banking at Merrill Lynch, SocGen, and Baring Brothers in London, New York, and Hong Kong. In 2022, Mr. Radia was named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s “LA 500”, an exclusive list of Angelenos who have positively impacted their communities, and to the LABJ’s  “Top Private Equity Advisors” and “Leaders of Influence” lists.