Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and Chief Monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it.

In this episode, member Lev Finn alum gives us a 10-minute primer on mezzanine financing and shares his

career path. Learn about why he got into investment banking in the first place, what's the hardest

part about running his own shop,

as well as his one piece of forward to seeing how I can help.

So it'd be great if you could give everyone just a short bio.

Yeah, so over my career now has spanned, gosh, almost 25, 26 years, started off generically out of undergrad in

investment banking in New York, did that for through the two-year analyst program, into, you know,

an associate left that firm to continue to,

still in the leverage finance business on the by side, you know, with a, with a mezzanine

slash equity fund, also based in New York did that for another few years deciding gosh I was living in

New York and reached the point where I thought gosh I can continue down this path and probably

have a pretty good life, but decided at some point

I needed to grow up.

So I thought grad school was a great way to do that and decided to move back towards where

I grew up closer to, closer to Texas.

So ended up at grad school in Dallas and have continued a career at post-MBA

in the deal finance world. First in project finance funding and investing in power projects,

then back into leverage finance in some capacity as an advisor, then as a lender directly.

Finally at a boutique operational turnaround specialist, I was based mostly in Dallas. The firm itself was based elsewhere,

but after building a network here, decided that I would want to continue to do what I did,

but started my own firm three years ago and have been doing similar, although maybe down market

...