Sell-Side Strategies: Navigating Today’s M&A Market

Dustin is an award-winning business journalist, bestselling author, and the chief content officer of Smart Business. Over the past 30 years, he has interviewed thousands of business and civic leaders, and helped more than 50 CEOs and entrepreneurs transform their ideas into books. A trained investigative politics reporter and former digital media entrepreneur, Dustin joined Smart Business in 1997 after serving as an editor at several daily newspapers.

Alex is a member of Dickinson Wright in Columbus, Ohio. He practices business transactional law, with an emphasis on advising privately-held and venture-capital backed companies in capital raising, mergers & acquisitions, and transactions involving technology, software, electronic commerce and intellectual property. He serves as outside counsel to a number of companies, from startup SAAS businesses to national healthcare technology companies. Other areas of his practice include venture capital fund formation and investments, intellectual property asset protection, privacy and data security, emerging business and complex transactions. He counsels clients in business entity selection and formation, protection and commercialization of technology assets, private securities offerings, utilizing distributed ledger/blockchain technology, and data security issues.

Alex has represented an international privately-held entity in bolt-on acquisitions and negotiating and drafting enterprise-wide SAAS agreements and a growth stage technology company in raising venture capital and licensing its proprietary software as SAAS solutions to its national and international customers. He also has closed several M&A transactions, on both the buyer and seller sides.  Alex also represents several venture capital funds in their investments into scalable technology companies.

In 2001, Bassem Mansour co-founded Resilience Capital Partners. He is involved in all aspects of overseeing the firm’s operations, including investment decisions, portfolio company oversight, and investor relations. Since 1994, he has been involved in principal investing, leveraged buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, Chapter 11 reorganizations, and out-of-court restructurings.

Prior to founding Resilience, he was an investment banker with KeyBanc Capital Markets (formerly McDonald Investments). He is a member of the Cleveland Chapter of Young Presidents Organization as well as several professional organizations.

Bassem serves on the board of directors for numerous Resilience portfolio companies. In addition, he formerly served on the boards of the Hathaway Brown School, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the Visiting Committee of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and the Western Reserve Land Conservancy.

yle Shen is the President & CEO of Nexceris, an electrochemical and catalyst solution provider for companies scaling up from lab to launch. Kyle has run companies in various industries, resulting in several successful exits.

Andy is Managing Director and Co-CEO of Bellmark Partners, LLC, and head of the firm’s Cleveland office. Andy has 30 years of investment banking experience, having personally completed well over 100 M&A, special committee, and board advisory assignments. Previously, he was with KeyBanc Capital Markets, where he was head of the sponsor coverage, consumer & retail, and M&A investment banking groups.