In 1935, there was a flood of disastrous news all over New England-indeed, from coast to coast... Unemployment was at an all-time high and unemployment lines stretched blocks long. Capital was nearly impossible to access and many businesses had been laying off employees little by little for years-business bankruptcies were commonplace. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected president in 1932, and declared a "Bank Holiday" to stop the "run on banks" in 1933. His wide-sweeping and controversial social programs were being vigorously debated.

It was in this landscape that a man from New Hampshire named Nathaniel Foote Bigelow formed his own firm, then called Bigelow & Company. He set out to assist Owner-Managed companies in the area with ways to run their businesses more efficiently, access capital to expand, and provide sound-reasoned advice on business combinations.

"Nat" was a classic entrepreneur, perhaps more of a leader than a Manager, who was well known for his insatiable curiosity and interest in new business ideas. He put his money where his interest was, as over the years he founded a highly successful accounting practice, a management consulting firm, what we believe was the first "computer service bureau," and was a founder or venture investor in over a dozen successful private companies. Nat was performing a venture capital service before the term "venture capital" was coined.

The 1970s Marked a Shift Toward Mergers and Acquisitions

In the 1970's, Nat brought aboard a team of seasoned professional management consultants, who grew the consultative aspect of the firm with a strong emphasis toward strategy ..."how to build sustainable value" ... and merger/acquisition ... "how to capture value."

As the capital markets matured in the late 1970's and early 1980's, structural rates of interest increased, and the prime interest rate for corporate borrowers reached nearly 20%. It serves us well to remind ourselves that at the time, those with access to capital could usually not justify it, as the returns on capital were less than its cost! Business combinations therefore, became an increasingly important way for Owner-Managed firms to grow, and thus became a dominant focus of the practice with a special emphasis on what happens "after the marriage."

The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and businesses began to first invest in, and then benefit from the productivity brought about by technology. It may have been on this occasion that the Firm's partners concluded that while high yield bonds were sweeping Wall Street, those trends largely ignored "Main Street," as the need by Owner-Managers for sophisticated investment banking increased. Bigelow's response was to raise capital-large amounts of it-for its Clients in equity and debt markets.

Current Bigelow Principals Go "Narrow and Deep," Focusing on Owner-Managers

By the 1990's, the ownership of the Company had transitioned to its current principals, and the corporate form and name were changed accordingly to The Bigelow Company LLC. While the Firm enjoyed considerable success with a wide variety of Clients, including advising divisions of IBM and American Express on specialty acquisitions, it became increasingly clear that our passion and drive are fueled from the opportunity to work side-by-side with the "Owner-Manager," not a middle Manager reporting to some higher authority. The Seattle office was opened in the late 1990's, and the Firm again went narrow and deep. Narrow, where it specialized exclusively in the strategy and implementation of sell side M&A exclusively for "Owner-Managed enterprises," along with its direct private investment activities.

By the year 2000, The Bigelow Company LLC had closed over $1 billion in transactions for the previous several years, and had a half dozen direct investments as a principal in areas including aerospace, for-profit education, high technology packaging, and digital networking. We are "opportunity rich," and accordingly have adopted a philosophy of only taking on a limited number of Clients, permitting the concentration of passion and creativity on a select few situations where we believe we can bring high value.

In The Bigelow Company's headquarters, we are reminded of our Firm's historic roots by the portrait of a nattily dressed and bow-tied Nat Bigelow. It looks to us that, when he sat for the portrait, it was already evident that the Firm would become one of the most successful investment banks in the business of dealing with Owner-Managers.

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