Donald Bibeault
Donald Bibeault is regarded as one of the nation’s leading turnaround practitioners, having won broad recognition for saving underperforming companies in numerous industries. In 2005, he became the first-ever recipient of the Turnaround Management Association’s lifetime achievement award.
During a turnaround career that has spanned more than thirty years, Dr. Bibeault has served as Chairman, CEO, or Chief Operating Officer of numerous corporations, including Pacific States Steel, PLM International, Best Pipe and Steel, Inc., Ironstone Group, Inc., American National Petroleum, Inc., Tyler-Dawson Supply, Iron Oak Supply Corporation and Bsquare Corporation. He has also served as special turnaround advisor to the CEOs of Silicon Graphics Inc., Varity Corporation (formerly Massey Ferguson), Yipes Networks, Bank of America, as well as several leading private equity firms such as TA Associates and Highland Capital Management.
Dr. Bibeault earned his Army commission through R.O.T.C. and served in the US Army Combat Engineers. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rhode Island, an MBA from Columbia University, a Juris Doctor (honoris causa) from Golden Gate University and a PhD from Golden Gate University. He has been a member of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School, and is a trustee of Golden Gate University and a member of the University of Rhode Island Business Advisory Board.
His best selling book, Corporate Turnaround: How Managers Turn Losers Into Winners!, has been in print for more than twenty years and is widely regarded as the leading text in the field of turnaround management.
Virtually no other practitioner has both the sustained operating track record and major contributions to the intellectual capital of the turnaround industry. The conceptual framework for turnarounds—first articulated in his 1979 Ph.D. dissertation and later popularized in his best selling book—set the stage for the growth of the professional field of turnaround management. In 1987, Dr. Bibeault was a founding Director of the Turnaround Management Association.
Elias Farhat
Mr. Farhat has been a strategy and private equity professional for more than seventeen years. In addition to his principal investing activities, he has also advised boards, CEOs and senior management of multi-national companies across Europe, the US and Latin America, as well as the nation’s most prominent private equity firms. His industry experience is wide ranging, including consumer products, business services, medical/health, OEM manufacturing.
Mr. Farhat is the Chief Investment Officer of Plutus Capital Management, LLP, a multi-strategy global investment firm with headquarters in London and offices in North America. He shares this leadership position with the firm’s founder, and Mr. Farhat is managing partner the firm’s global private equity platform. He is also the founder and managing partner of Velocity Advisors, Inc., a specialized private equity and buyout firm focused on middle-market transactions, where he has screened more than $10B in buy-out opportunities and has selectively co-invested in a proportion of these transactions.
For twelve years, Mr. Farhat was Partner at Bain & Company, one of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms. At Bain, he also ran the firm’s private equity activities from 1999 to 2002, and oversaw more than $300MM in equity investments in partnership with top-quartile buyout funds.
Prior to Bain, Mr. Farhat established and launched a $500MM buyout fund for Dallah Al Baraka (Dallah Bank), a Saudi-based financial institution where he led a private team that invested in a number of businesses throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Mr. Farhat is a graduate of ESSEC (Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales) in Paris. He is fluent in English, French, Arabic and Spanish.