Category: Tips & Tricks

Sales recognition awards can be invaluable to the performance and destiny of your organization. At least that’s the wisdom put out, not surprisingly, by organizations that sell sales recognition awards.

But despite the self-serving insights, and the sketchy, fishy-looking “white papers” they often offer up to support them, these companies aren’t wrong.

Employee recognition awards do provide some very real benefits—and they’ve been pointed out by objective sources that aren’t actually in the business of selling you awards.

The Benefits of Sales Recognition Awards and Beyond

And, importantly, those benefits can be both meaningful and enduring.

Forbes recently reported three relevant findings regarding employee recognition. The first was that recognized employees tend to be happier, and as a result, more productive.

Secondly, employee appreciation helps create a climate of trust—especially trust flowing upwards, to both immediate management and organizational leadership more broadly.

Finally, recognition tends to mitigate employee turnover, an issue (and nagging ongoing expense) that has caused even greater disruption in the post-pandemic workplace.

A 2021 McKinsey study amplified some of the points made by Forbes. It also made the challenge of reducing employee turnover even starker.

McKinsey found that managers tended to cite compensation issues as the chief reason employees had left their firms.

When asked the same question, those employees themselves mentioned cultural concerns as their top motivation. They simply felt that they were not either valued or recognized.

The Shortcomings of Employee Recognition

Having a recognition program in place doesn’t necessarily address these issues.

The fact that employee awards—in this case, sales recognition awards—can be highly effective doesn’t ensure that they’re anywhere near as effective as they could, or should be. Quality and perceived value go a long way in determining their actual impact.

Based on our 40 years of experience in honoring success and achievement in a variety of forms in several different sectors, most organizations are not realizing these benefits fully. They tend to miss out on two crucial aspects of sales recognition, which we explore below.

What People Dislike About Ordering Awards

Before going into what’s missing from sales awards programs, it’s important to recognize some truths.

If you’ve previously been given the task of sourcing sales awards, you’re probably already familiar with these challenges. If this is your first time, you may already be sensing them.

Even if you weren’t given much in the way of guidance, you were probably given some rough parameters. And even if they weren’t made explicit, those guidelines were probably along the lines of “Don’t spend too much money—but don’t get something that looks cheap, either.”

That can translate into a lot of pressure.

Because if you’re the person with the responsibility for tracking down awards you also (most likely) have a budget—and a deadline.

You also don’t have an infinite amount of time to devote to awards as well.

Sales Recognition Awards Pitfall: Too Many Stars…and Eagles

The lack of time and the fear of making a poor award choice leads to a common pitfall.

The one recurring shortcoming of many sales recognition programs is that they’re too formulaic. Whether it’s the result of a lack of time, or simply a preference for sticking with past practice, too many organizations take the path of least resistance.

What does that mean?

It means settling for sales awards and trophies that are so overused they have been elevated to cliches.

But it’s understandable why these well-worn designs and concepts continue to have appeal.

Just think of all the websites touting, for instance, various prefab, off-the-shelf, interchangeable “star”-themed awards—all readily available and identifiable by product number for easy ordering.

But does a hastily bought, lookalike award really communicate the honor and recognition you’re attempting to convey?

The Other, Main Missing Element

Just to be clear: there are “off-the-shelf” awards that have obvious perceived value among recipients.

The fact that a design appears as a selection in a pre-established, award “line” doesn’t mean it’s somehow not worthy of the achievement it recognizes. (It would be hypocrtical of us to suggest this. We regularly provide clients with more traditional, classic designs like this.)

Again, these awards can have very high perceived value. But choosing them forfeits an opportunity.

That opportunity involves branding.

Awards provide an opportunity to celebrate individual or collective achievement. That may mean the attainment of record sales or a sales goal by a team, or simply the highest numbers achieved by an individual salesperson.

But awards—especially sales awards—also provide an opportunity to celebrate and advance your organization’s brand.

The award can achieve that in a variety of ways. The design, for instance, could be customized to reflect your company’s logo, its geographic location, industry, or its products and services. (And what could be more meaningful to sales success than the very product or service being sold?)

The point is that a custom award can achieve this dual function—and again, this is something we also provide for clients on a regular basis.

Sales Recognition Awards at The Corporate Presence

But if you go the custom award route, won’t it cost you more in time…and money?

Not necessarily.

You can always explore a more custom award design while, at the same time, also considering more traditional designs. A good awards company can spare you the time and effort involved in compiling those designs. You may also find that a customized award actually saves you money.

There’s another option as well.

Another option that can ultimately save you both time and money involves developing a unique award based specifically on your logo, product, service, industry etc.

Establishing this kind of “signature” award design has the benefit of furthering your organization’s brand. But it also vastly reduces the time, effort, and likely, expense of sourcing those awards going forward.

At The Corporate Presence, we’ve also been designing these kinds of signature awards for over 40 years. Whether your initial preference is a conventional sales award, or something more customized, we can guide you to a successful result. Get the award process started. Reach out to us today.

Sustainability isn’t exactly a new focus, either for financial transactions themselves or for the deal toys that commemorate them. After all, sustainability has been a corporate tenet for decades now, and become the centerpiece of any number of prominent funds in the ESG space.

Not surprisingly, deal toys based on the financing and development of alternative energy sources, for instance, are pretty commonplace.

Over the years we’ve commemorated alternative energy transactions based not only in a number of U.S. states, but also in countries such as Poland, Spain, England, Finland, Norway, Australia, Germany, and Korea.

You’ve undoubtedly already seen a number of tombstones similar to these. Their designs tend to play off wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and less conspicuously, other sources such as hydrogen fuel cells, and geothermal energy.

What’s often overlooked among these recurring designs though is the variety of ways that sustainability and renewability themes an be made the focus of deal toys.

The sustainability theme can be showcased through any number of deal elements, such as the type of transaction, the resources and products involved, the subject company or organization, as well as any relevant alternative technologies.

We’ve put together below some ideas on the different ways sustainability themes can be highlighted in financial tombstone designs. These designs also reflect a range of both materials and price points.

Sustainability-Themed Deal Toys Based on Transaction Type

Green bonds have been the most notable environmentally-focused financial instruments. Since their debut in 2007, the cumulative issuance of green bonds surpassed USD 2 trillion by 2020, and currently stands at approximately 2.2 trillion. Additionally, green debt instruments have originated from a total of 67 nations..

The proceeds of these bonds are earmarked for a variety of initiatives, including sustainable infrastructure, pollution control and mitigation, and energy efficiency.

As you might expect, the color green tends to figure prominently in many of these designs, such as in this Lucite and resin tombstone commemorating a Swiss green bond issue.

As you might also expect, panoramas featuring blue skies, flowers, and greenery are also recurring motifs.

But the “green” theme can also be incorporated far less obviously.

In past posts, for instance, we’ve recommended code names as a source of deal toy design ideas. This was done in the case of the crystal design below, commemorating the acquisition of a Danish electricity supplier. The design pays tribute to the company’s environmental commitment indirectly, via the deal’s code name: “Project Mojito”.

Highlighting Resources in Sustainability Deal Toy Designs

Sustainability can also be worked in fairly directly through the particular resource or resources involved.

The crystal wood section below is a straightforward example. It celebrates the launch of a fund devoted to sustainable forestry.

Showcasing the Company or Organization

Green bonds are obviously not the only environmentally-linked financial instruments.

The tombstone below, for example, recognizes a C-PACE financing. C-PACE (Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy) is a state-level in initiative providing long-term, low-cost loans for energy-efficient upgrades to existing buildings, and also fostering sustainability features in new construction.

This design draws its inspiration from the recipient of this C-PACE loan: a Florida-based resort.

Sustainable Products or Services as a Design Source

In the Lucite deal toy below, the product is the centerpiece. The acquired company specializes in sustainable food and beverage packaging.

Another example is a design featured below, marking an acquisition in the IT space, and highlighting the energy-efficient measures of the two German data centers involved in the transaction. The tombstone design features a server that has seemingly sprouted from a patch of grass.

Alternative Energy Technologies

Again, chances are that you’ve already seen a number of deal toys based on alternative energy sources.

But what you may not fully appreciate is the range of design options within any of these particular sources.

You’ve most likely seen any number of deal toys, for instance, involving solar energy, with the vast majority of these in the shape of solar panel.

Another possible design option here is a Lucite embedment incorporating a section of a solar panel; in other words, the design would feature the actual solar panel used by you or your client.

This kind of highly customized commemorative tends to have tremendous perceived value among recipients—for the very reason that it is unique.  It is also one our clients have chosen not only for transactions related to solar, but also for non-financial milestones, such as the opening of, or groundbreaking for, a new solar facility.

Deal Toys at The Corporate Presence

The Corporate Presence can provide you with a full range of tombstone design options, not only for celebrating sustainability-themed transactions, but for any other deal or milestone you need to commemorate. We have over 40 years of experience providing commemoratives in a variety of materials, and at a number of price points. Get the creative process started. Reach out to us today.

The phrase “investment banking tombstones” tends to conjure up some immediate associations. Buttoned-up, drab, and probably most of all, boring.

A lot of that’s undoubtedly due to the word “tombstone”. In just about any context, the word pretty much insures a somber, funereal tone.

Which is unfortunate.

Because a lot of the deals behind investment banking tombstones are anything but boring. That seems more apparent when tombstones  go by another, even more popular name: “deal toys”.

Whatever exact term is used, tombstones/deal toys—designed to celebrate and commemorate investment banking deals—can have extremely creative and memorable designs.

And sometimes as well, the stories behind deals that they chronicle can be just as fascinating. Below we share the stories behind just a few of the high-profile deals The Corporate Presence has helped commemorate over its 40+-year history.

The Tombstone for a Megadeal…Signed at a Food Stamps Office

Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp is a compelling story from a number of perspectives. But it’s hard not to focus on what the deal represented for one of the company’s founders, Jan Koum.

Koum walked away from the acquisition with $3.5 billion from Facebook. Only seven years earlier,  Facebook had rejected his employment application (as well as that of co-founder Brian Acton).

Koum brought another dramatic touch to the deal when he agreed to the terms.

The sign-off didn’t take place at WhatsApp’s Mountain View, California headquarters. It was performed instead at a building just down the street—one very familiar to the Ukrainian immigrant who came to the U.S. at 16 and whose first job was sweeping the floor at a grocery store.

The building had been the headquarters of North County Social Services. It was also where Koun and his mother had once regularly picked up food stamps.

The Disney-Pixar Deal Tombstone

How did you spend your second day on the job? Trying to track down someone in I.T.? Trying to figure out which of your new colleagues secretly swapped out your office chair and stuck you with a broken one?

On October 2, 2005—Day Two in his tenure as Disney CEO—Robert Iger pitched the acquisition of Pixar to the company’s board.

Among other things, the deal made Steve Jobs a Disney director, and also its largest individual stockholder. It also helped appease Roy Disney, a major stockholder, who’d accused the company of abandoning its considerable legacy in animation.

But most of all, the deal was profitable.

Looking back over his years at Disney, Iger would rank the deal his “proudest decision”—even above the acquisitions that brought in Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Fox. The animation studio has brought in over $14.7 billion in global box office, with about $11.5 billion of that coming after the Disney deal.

The Investment Banking Tombstone from the Stolen Deal

Capturing all the highs and lows of this deal’s saga—across two continents and multiple time zones– might be beyond the reach of a mere tombstone. You might have to resort to Kabuki, interpretive dance, or even opera for that.

That said, you can get a sense of some of the raw emotions involved in the above tombstone’s playful reference to the dashed (here literally squashed) dreams and expectations of one of the parties to the deal.

And it was a 41 billion-dollar deal.

The turning point came when a group of defeated bankers at a late-night, cry-in-your-beer outing at a three-star Michelin restaurant in Manhattan got a call to arms from several of their clients—and a flanking plan was hatched.

To get the full story on all the machinations that occurred, in London and New York, on that early morning in February, 2004, check out our account of the purloined deal and its tombstone.

Protecting Us from that Lousy, Two-Bit Stock

Over its storied history, our nation has looked to the state of Massachusetts for a number of things.

In 1980, unfortunately, stock-picking wasn’t one of them.

Citing what the Wall Street Journal termed “several provisions aimed at weeding out highfliers that don’t have solid earnings foundations”, state regulators kept Bay State residents from participating in a sketchy-looking IPO.

And with that, the initial public offering of Apple, one of a number of landmark IPO tombstones we’ve handled over the years, was dismissed as “too risky”.

The Tombstone from the Best Deal…Ever?

Private equity firms aren’t usually noted for their patience.

But patience and discipline were two qualities that enabled Blackstone to salvage what looked like a horrendously bad deal.

How bad?

The timing, for one thing, couldn’t have been worse.

Blackstone closed its $26 billion buyout of Hilton Hotels just before the 2008 financial crisis, which not only did in two other deal participants (Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers) but led to the involvement of the New York Fed and litigation with a rival hotel firm.

“Heartbreak Hotel” and “Not So ‘Suite’ Deal” were just two gleefully dismissive headlines for the deal’s epitaph.

But Blackstone managed to turn things around—to say the least.

Read more about Blackstone’s turnaround strategy in the Hilton deal—as well as the tombstone we designed.

What’s Your Deal—and Story?

Whatever the story is behind your particular deal, big or small, The Corporate Presence can provide you with the same service and expertise we’ve been offering investment banking and other financial clients for over 40 years. Reach out to us and get the tombstone design process started.

In the 40+ years that The Corporate Presence has been designing and producing deal toys, we’ve worked with a large and varied list of clients. Sadly, many of those clients are no longer with us.

As we’ve noted in our installments of the Dinosaur Deal Toys series, those former clients include firms such as Paine Webber, Bear Stearns, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette,  and Wasserstein Perella,

It also includes James D. Wolfensohn, Montgomery Securities, NationsBank, Bankers Trust, Wachovia, Alex Brown and Salomon Brothers—to name just a few.

Which brings us to the financial tombstone shown here.

What’s special about this deal toy?

There’s nothing particularly emblematic about either CoolSavings, or the Lucite tombstone that commemorates this offering of its stock.

It seemed almost impossible for any tech company of the 90’s to emerge from the so-called Dotcom Bubble (and resulting Crash) entirely unscathed.

CoolSavings was no exception. But it did survive. And in relative terms at least, merely got its hair mussed.

So why focus on this 23-year-old deal—and its deal toy?

A more compelling aspect of this deal toy—and its underlying deal—might be that none of the three listed underwriters are still in existence.

What happened to them? Find out below.

The CoolSavings Deal Toy and the “Four Horsemen”

The first listed firm, Chase H&Q, had some prior experience as an underwriter.

In fact, in its previous incarnation, as Hambrecht & Quist, the firm had lorded over the tech world as one of the Bay Area’s investment banking “Four Horsemen”.

Founded in 1968 by Bill Hambrecht and George Quist, H&Q had led the public offerings of Silicon Valley companies that were emblematic of both a time and place. These included Apple, Adobe, Netscape, as wall as biotech titan Genentech.

After its acquisition by Chase in 1999, H&Q continued as Chase H&Q before ultimately being absorbed by JP Morgan Chase.

Deal Links to Two Other IB “Horsemen”

There are two other links to the Four Horsemen in this deal.

San Francisco banker Sandy Robertson had grown tired of tech skeptics in his New York-based firm. (In a typical barb, some of his East Coast Smith Barney colleagues disparaged a laser firm involved in one of his deals as the “ray gun company”). In 1969, he formed his own technology-oriented investment bank, Robertson, Colman & Siebel.

Robertson also formed an uneasy relationship with one of his partners, Thomas Weisel. Weisel ultimately left to form his own firm. Weisel’s new firm was called Montgomery Securities. Robertson’s reconstituted firm became Robertson Stephens.

The two former colleagues and their firms would maintain an intense rivalry. Together they would also comprise two of the Four Horsemen. (Ironically, through a series of subsequent mergers, the two warring horsemen would almost find themselves thrown together in the same corporate stable).

After Montgomery was acquired by NationsBank, Weisel founded the firm listed here, one that would be more commonly known as TWP. Thomas Weisel Partners was itself acquired by Stifel in 2010.

The Weisel name carried some obvious cachet. It lives on as the “TWP” wealth management division of Stifel.

Lehman Brothers: The Final Deal Toy Casualty

You get a sense of the epic sweep of the collapse of the final underwriter, Lehman Brothers, in the recent play chronicling the firm’s 163-year history. “The Lehman Trilogy” was originally written in Italian, translated into French, and then adapted and staged in London, all en route to an eventual Broadway production.

The bank’s fate has been endlessly researched, recounted, documented, analyzed, and revisited.

We had our own unique perspective on the firm’s demise. Lehman had been a longstanding client of The Corporate Presence. It had, in fact, been our largest client. (It was a measure of the deep business and personal ties we had with the firm that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, we provided space in our New York office for some of Lehman’s displaced art and graphics staff).

At the time of its bankruptcy filing on September 15, 2008, Lehman had been the 4th largest U.S. investment bank. It had $639 billion in assets, and 25,000 employees worldwide.

What Happened to CoolSavings?

So, what happened to CoolSavings, which, after all, was the focus of both the deal and deal toy?

As its name and piggybank logo suggest, the company sought to save both consumers and retailers time and money via a proprietary, coupon-based, online matching network.

But only a year after its 2000 initial public offering , the company faced the prospect of delisting on NASDAQ.

Having weathered patent challenges, cash constraints, and a declining stock price, CoolSavings changed its name to Q Interactive in 2006. In 2016 it was acquired by Fluent.

This post is one in a series celebrating some of the deals and dealmakers in The Corporate Presence’s 40-years of designing and providing deal toys and custom awards. Another recent post in this series focused on the late Bruce Wasserstein.  Along with partner Joseph Perella, Wasserstein founded one of the premier boutique investment firms, Wasserstein Perella.

But four of the most influential and highly regarded boutique investment banking firms were once based not in New York, but in San Francisco.

We knew each of these firms well, having served as their primary deal toy providers, and over the course of several of their individual incarnations.

Together they comprised the so-called “Four Horsemen” of Silicon Valley’s tech-oriented firmament.

What happened to these firms?

A couple of the firm names live on, but, again, in very different incarnations.

But, more importantly, as with Wasserstein Perella, their collective legacy lives on. It can be seen today in the dynamism of smaller, independent, boutique firms like Moelis and Evercore.

Read more about these firms and the part they played in the formative days of the Silicon Valley tech scene.

Robertson Stephens

A few sneering comments played a role in the founding of Robertson Stephens.

Sandy Robertson originally came to California in 1965 as an investment banker for Smith Barney. One of his early deals involved the sale of a laser company owned by Tom Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist who would go on to shepherd the growth of Google, Amazon, and Genentech, among others.

When East Coast colleagues ridiculed his deal with Perkins’s “ray gun company”, Robertson saw the potential limitations of seeking out tech deals for a New York-based bank.

He decided to set out on his own.

The firm he created in would ultimately guide a parade of IPO’s, including those of MapQuest and E-Trade.

Hambrecht & Quist

Hambrecht & Quist was founded by Bill Hambrecht and George Quist in 1968.

H&Q, as it was commonly known, had an extraordinary run in the 80’s and 90’s. It brought public a litany of Silicon Valley titans including Apple, Adobe, and Netscape, as well as biotech pioneer Genentech.

Hambrecht was a champion of the Dutch auction, and it was the model he famously used to bring Google public in 2004.  He’s maintained since that the strategy raised the stock’s actual pricing level 30% over what would’ve been realized through a traditional IPO process.

Montgomery Securities

It’s somehow fitting that the Montgomery Securities saga of Thomas Weisel, a former speed skater, would take him at breakneck speed in a loop—and ultimately land him where he’d first begun.

Weisel founded the firm after breaking with former colleague Sandy Robertson—launching an intense competition between Montgomery and Robertson Stephens.

Ironically, a series of acquisitions threatened to reunite the two bitter rivals together under the same roof; but the merger between BankAmerica (which had bought up Robertson Stephens) and NationsBank (Montgomery’s acquirer) never materialized.

Alex Brown

Alex Brown was actually based in Baltimore, but by virtue of its Bay Area roots (it had had a San Francisco office since the end of World War II), it tended to be regarded as a local.

Its roots in Baltimore went considerably deeper. As the nation’s oldest investment banking firm, its first initial public offering was that of the Baltimore Water Company—in 1808.

Whatever its pedigree, the firm was still handling an impressive array of IPO’s almost two hundred years later.

Among the companies it took public were Oracle, Starbucks, and United Healthcare.

What Happened to Investment Banking’s Four Horsemen?

The Four Horsemen were done in by a combination of both conspicuous success and the markedly changed circumstances brought on by the tech downturn.

A dizzying number of transactions have occurred over the last 30 years involving the Horsemen and their various remnants.

NationsBank acquired Montgomery Securities in 1997.

Robertson Stephens was acquired in 1997 by BankAmerica, which, soon after, itself then agreed to merge with NationsBank.

That deal, as noted above, threatened to put two feuding siblings under the same corporate parent.

It didn’t happen.

Instead, in 1998, Roberstson Stephens was sold to BankBoston; after failing to find a buyer for the firm in a down tech market, Fleet (which had acquired BankBoston) shuttered Robertson Stephens in 2002.

The Robertson Stephens name survives in a San Francisco-based wealth management firm.

After subsequent transactions, Montgomery now continues only as a predecessor of Banc of America Securities.

Hambrecht and Quist, once the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, was acquired by Chase Manhattan in 1999. It has since been absorbed within JPMorgan Chase.

Alex Brown was bought by Bankers Trust in 1997.

After a brief incarnation as BT Alex. Brown, the firm was, in turn, absorbed by Deutsche Bank in the wake of its acquisition of BT.

The Alex Brown name is now attached to a wealth management division of Raymond James.

In a nod to the enduring power of the brand name, the Alexander Brown Restaurant opened in Baltimore in 2019. Located in the bank’s historic former headquarters, it closed in 2020, a victim of the pandemic shutdown.

Deal Toys for Your Era—and Deals

At The Corporate Presence we’ve been privileged to work with a number of premier firms over the years. Some of them, such as the Four Horseman, are sadly now defunct.

But whatever the size of your firm, or your deal, we continue, as then, to offer your team with the same outstanding service we provided then. Reach out to us today.

Of all the deal toys The Corporate Presence has created for clients over its 44-year history the design below might seem pretty unremarkable.

After all, it’s an ordinary rectangle.

But it does have all the virtues of a classic deal toy design: clean, simple, linear and above all, straightforward.

The deal it commemorates, on the other hand, was anything but.

And it’s probably better captured by the other deal toy we designed, shown here below. It marks the very same transaction.

“It’s Dealnapping!” a New York Post headline had screamed.

And this was one New York Post headline that didn’t seem so overheated.

In fact, the stakes in the telecom deal it’d trumpeted had had global implications, pitting U.S.-based Cingular against Britain’s Vodafone.

The deal would also ultimately create the the U.S.’s largest wireless network, boasting 46 million customers and $32 billion in revenue.

And the deal value would itself would exceed $40 billion.

But this particular megadeal, with the finish line seemingly crossed, had been hijacked.

And it all went down in February 2004, in a law office in midtown Manhattan, in the dead of night.

Cingular and AT&T Wireless..and Vodafone

“Nothing good”, Ted Mosby famously observed, “happens after 2 a.m.”

And in this case, true to form, it happened at around 2:30.

Except for the victims.

In London it was actually around 7:30. And the day was just beginning.

And if you were a banker or attorney on the Vodafone deal team, it was a fine morning indeed.

The offer by Britain’s Vodafone for America’s then third-largest mobile phone company had apparently been accepted.

Their work, and their deal, was done.

And if the London team needed further confirmation, and had somehow managed to see a hard-copy edition of USA Today that morning, that happy fact was reported there and also in a story by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Matt Richtel of the New York Times headed “Vodafone is Seen as Favored Buyer of AT&T Wireless”.

The Done Deal—That Wasn’t

Only those news reports were mistaken.

A flanking maneuver had been sprung only hours before from an unlikely Manhattan redoubt: the three-Michelin-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park.

It was there that a group of defeated bankers had gathered for some consoling drinks.

And it was there that they were tracked down by the chairmen of Cingular’s parent companies, SBC Communications, and BellSouth, still stewing over the loss, and determined to top the existing offer of $14.50 a share.

By 1:30 an emergency conference call was underway. By 2:00 a.m., a group of twenty Cingular advisers was en route to the offices of law firm Wachtell Lipton with what proved to be the winning bid of $15.00 per share–resulting in what was then the largest cash acquisition in U.S. corporate history.

All while London slept.

But Did the London Deal Team Really Lose?

You didn’t need a semiotics degree to decode the triumphant deal toy—with Vodafone and its bid being literally and figuratively squashed underfoot by Cingular’s “Jack” character.

But who really got the upper hand?

In the immediate aftermath of its “defeat” Vodafone’s stock actually went up.

And at least one commentator praised Vodafone for a “strategic masterpiece”, in which it “ran up the bidding in a stroke of competitive gamesmanship unlike any in recent memory”.

For some American consumers, at least, it was hard not to feel whipsawed by subsequent events.

Just three years later, AT&T Wireless customers who’d already had to adjust to Cingular, now had to cope with yet another rebranding.

The Cingular name would be disappearing, in favor of the name of the company that had just gained full ownership of BellSouth and with it the nation’s largest wireless carrier: AT&T.

David Parry is the Director of Digital Strategy for the Corporate Presence and Prestige Custom Awards, which provides a variety of custom awards including ESPN’s Espy Awards, and The National Football League Commissioner’s Awards.

This post was originally written to commemorate the 40th anniversary of The Corporate Presence as a provider of deal toys and custom awards.

It’s also part of a series of posts celebrating some of the noteworthy deals—and personalities behind them—that we have helped celebrate since 1981.

We’re presenting this again in honor of the 13th anniversary this month, of the death at 61, of one of those personalities: Bruce Wasserstein.

A Legendary Deal Pitch

It was known as the “Dare to be Great” speech.

And it came to be celebrated as one of Bruce Wasserstein’s signature ploys.

Detractors, on the other hand, charged that the emboldening pitch often went too far, causing his clients to overpay, and thereby earning Wasserstein the nickname—which he predictably despised—“Bid-’em Up Bruce”.

In his first run-in with his future partner, Joseph Perella witnessed Wasserstein overtake and then completely commandeer a deal meeting.

That seemed understandable: when it came to mergers, few individuals seemed more qualified to hold forth on the subject than Wasserstein.

He’d studied British merger law while on a fellowship at Cambridge, having already received both a business and law degree from Harvard (and even serving, while at Harvard, as a member of Ralph Nader’s reform-minded Nader’s Raiders.)

That drive to dominate would ultimately cause the two men to part ways professionally, but not before they’d done much to transform the more staid and clubby province that was once investment banking.

The Twin Totems of First Boston

Wasserstein tended to get top billing in the duo, but it was Perella who actually gave him his start in banking.

At the time of that first meeting in 1977, Wasserstein was an associate—though not with a Wall Street shop but with the blue-blood law firm Cravath Swaine & Moore.

Just two years out of Harvard Business School, Perella lured Wasserstein to the M&A department he’d founded only a year before at what was then First Boston (long since absorbed by Credit Suisse).

Perella and Wasserstein, The Wall Street Journal noted in 1988, “formed an odd but complementary couple: Mr. Wasserstein, who recently turned 40, is short and often disheveled; Mr. Perella, 46, is tall and immaculately dressed. Mr. Wasserstein is intense and egotistical; Mr. Perella is affable and reassuring to corporate executives.”

After 10 years at First Boston, during which they completed over 1,000 deals (including Texaco’s $10.1 billion acquisition of Getty Oil in 1984), the two departed after a long-simmering dispute over the firm’s commitment to merchant banking, and its perceived deference to traders.

The pair’s impact on dealmaking was undeniable; they brought an aggressive, sharp-elbowed style to M&A, popularizing such tactics as the “two-tier” tender offer, bridge loans, and lock-up options.

They also unmistakably brought profits: when they left First Boston to start their own firm in 1988, it was estimated that M&A accounted for as much as half of First Boston’s profits and a third of its revenue.

The Rise of Boutique Investment Banking Firms

The duo at the heart of the firm Wasserstein Perella—known variously as “WP” or “Wasserella”—only stayed together for five years. In 1993, Perella left for Morgan Stanley where he would become global head of investment banking, and later leave in 2006 to form Perella Weinberg.

Wasserstein would sell WP to Dresdner Bank in 2000. He went on to Lazard, which he took public and remained at until his death in 2009.

But the firm’s enduring legacy goes far beyond the deal toys shown here. The huge and precipitous financial impact of their departure from First Boston spurred frantic efforts to retain rainmakers, and is largely credited with giving rise to what’s often derisively referred to as investment banking’s “bonus culture”.

Their legacy is also seen in the many boutique firms that sprung up at the time (and continues to be seen today in successful examples of the model such as Moelis and Evercore).

The Corporate Presence was privileged to have worked with many of these boutique firms, including Robertson Stephens, Montgomery Securities, Hambrecht & Quist, and Alex. Brown.

You can see examples of our designs for these firms, and others, in our series “Dinosaur Deal Toys”.

David Parry is the Director of Digital Strategy for the Corporate Presence and Prestige Custom Awards, which provides a variety of custom awards including ESPN’s Espy Awards, and The National Football League.