#EDGEVIEW PARTNERS CHARLOTTE MANUAL#

I would rather fail having tried than regretting something I knew was an irreplaceable opportunity.”ĭespite starting the firm the month before 9/11, the company found success, and eventually sold to CIT Group in 2007. “I would be very unfulfilled if I hadn’t at least tried. “I really thought that I was making a decision for my family instead of myself,” Garner said. So, the day his postacquisition employment agreement expired, Garner resigned and joined with four like-minded partners to open their own M&A advisory firm, Edgeview Partners. In 1993, Garner was recruited to the Charlotte, North Carolina-based middle-market M&A firm Bowles Hollowell Conner & Co., an investment banking firm that appeared to him to be “one of the best jobs outside of New York.”Īfter five years of helping to build the business, the firm sold to First Union Corp., and Garner again found himself working in the sort of large corporate bank he had only recently left. “For me, I needed a sense that I could really measure that contribution I was making to my firm.” “With a firm the size of Merrill Lynch, I just felt like my path was going to be very crowded,” Garner said. Instead, despite the “fantastic” bull market of the 1990s, both the ongoing grind of life in New York City and the lure of returning closer to home led Garner to explore new opportunities. Merrill Lynch sponsored Garner’s two years at Darden, and Garner said he assumed he would work at the company for the rest of his life.

#EDGEVIEW PARTNERS CHARLOTTE MANUAL#

Garner said the analyst job in the early days of his Merrill Lynch career was a relatively manual job, with the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3 having just come on the scene. “I never imagined when I started my career that I would have helped found an investment banking company, sold it, bought it back and sold again.” “Twenty five years from now my guess is you’re going to be doing something dramatically different than what you’re doing now,” said Garner, who also serves as co-head of diversified industrials and services at the investment and advisory firm.

Speaking to students at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business during a recent Darden Dialogues event, Garner said he never could have projected the twists his career would take when starting out as an investment banking analyst at Merrill Lynch after college.

Being open to change and hungry to keep learning are critical attributes for sustained career success, according to Piper Jaffray Managing Director Ted Garner (MBA ’90).

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