Houlihan Lokey Inc Company Profile

Established in 1972, Houlihan Lokey, Inc., is a leading global independent investment bank with expertise in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), financings, financial restructurings and financial advisory services. Through our offices in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, we serve a diverse set of clients worldwide including corporations, financial sponsors and government agencies. We provide our financial professionals with an integrated platform that enables them to deliver meaningful and differentiated advice to our clients. We advise our clients on critical strategic and financial decisions, employing a rigorous analytical approach coupled with deep product and industry expertise. We market our services through our product areas, our industry groups and our Financial Sponsors group, serving our clients in three primary business practices: Corporate Finance (encompassing M&A and capital markets advisory), Financial Restructuring (both out-of-court and in formal bankruptcy or insolvency proceedings) and Financial Advisory Services (including financial opinions, and a variety of valuation and financial consulting services).

We are committed to a set of principles that serve as the backbone to our success. Independent advice and intellectual rigor, combined with consistent senior-level involvement, are hallmarks of our commitment to client service. Our entrepreneurial culture engenders our flexibility to collaborate across our business practices to provide world-class solutions for our clients. Our broad-based employee ownership serves to align the interests of employees and shareholders and further encourages a collaborative environment where our Corporate Finance, Financial Restructuring and Financial Advisory Services business practices work together productively and creatively to solve our clients’ most critical financial issues. We enter into businesses or offer services where we believe we can excel based on our expertise, analytical sophistication, industry focus and competitive dynamics. Finally, we remain independent and specialized, focusing on advisory products and market segments where our expertise is both differentiating and less subject to conflicts of interest arising from non-advisory services, and where we believe we can be a market leader in a particular segment. We do not lend or engage in any securities sales and trading operations or research which might conflict with our clients’ interests.

Our goal is to attract, develop and retain the best talent in our industry across all levels. We believe our compensation programs are competitive, offering a portion of compensation in deferred cash and a portion in deferred stock awards to provide incentives for our employees to remain with us. In addition, we strive to foster a collaborative environment to attract and retain employees, and we seek individuals who fit our culture of entrepreneurship, integrity, creativity and commitment to our clients. For over 20 years, we have emphasized broad employee ownership as a way to align the incentives of our employees and shareholders. We adopted the 2016 Incentive Award Plan in order to facilitate the grant of cash and equity incentives to directors, employees (including our named executive officers) and consultants of our company and certain of its affiliates, and to enable our company and its affiliates to obtain and retain services of these individuals, which is essential to our long-term success.

Our Managing Directors (other than our executive officers) are compensated based on their ability to deliver profitable revenues on a consistent basis to the firm, the quality of advice and execution provided to our clients, and their collaboration with their colleagues across industries, products and regions. We do not compensate on a commission-based pay model. Our compensation structure for junior financial professionals is based on a system of meritocracy whereby bankers are rewarded for past performance and expectation of future development, and compensation levels are tested against prevailing market compensation for bankers at similar levels.
The primary sources of recruitment for our junior financial professionals are leading undergraduate and graduate programs around the world. Our consistent hiring practices year after year have created partnerships with these prestigious institutions and resulted in a steady and high-quality pipeline of junior financial professionals. To supplement this annual class of new hires, we opportunistically and strategically hire professionals with experience and backgrounds relevant to our various businesses. Regardless of title, we place a high degree of emphasis on cultural fit, technical capability and individual character. When we hire junior financial professionals, we hire them directly into one of our business practices to enable them to begin to develop their relevant skill set from day one.