From history to corporate finance and back – Peter Bell of Cardean Bell on his career and personal highs
Founded in 2016 by Peter Bell, Cardean Bell has quickly become a trusted adviser in corporate finance advisory, specialising in M&A, IPO, and capital-raising services. Its diverse clientele includes entrepreneurs, founders, corporate leaders, and private equity firms within information services, media, leisure, retail and financial & business services. With more than $6 billion in transactions advised across the UK, Europe, and the US, Cardean Bell operates with a team of seasoned professionals delivering bespoke and targeted advice.
A focus on discretion and confidentiality is key to CEO Peter Bell’s operational ethos. He has a wealth of experience at major investment banks, including most recently five years as head of UK M&A at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, completing more than $100 billion in transactions across multiple sectors. After 24 years he made the decision to go it alone, away from the restrictions of management responsibilities and constant international travel to focus once again on particular industries and sectors.
“I had really wanted to work for myself for some time which is why I made the leap away from the high pressure world of American banking,” he says. “I like to think that at Cardean Bell we give an old-fashioned, highly intensive service,” he says. “Where some M&A advisers are quite light touch, we like to get really stuck into our mandates. I’m fully committed to each one as I lead the firm and originate the business, and it’s this trusted intensity of service that gives us the competitive edge.”
Successful career
With a place to read history at Durham University, Peter was commissioned into the 1st battalion of The Royal Scots (the Royal Regiment) during his gap year. “I wanted to sign up but knew it would have to be a fixed period,” he says about his time with one of the most famous infantry battalions in the UK. He was a platoon commander in the British Army of the Rhine facing the Soviet-backed East German Army across the then Inner German border in the last year of the Cold War. After finishing his History degree, he applied to join what he calls an ‘old fashioned UK merchant bank’, Kleinwort Benson, becoming an expat in Paris where he honed his financial skills. From there he went to Greenhill, a specialist M&A boutique, before moving on to Lehman/Nomura and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
During his corporate career he was involved in high-profile deals including Doughty Hanson’s acquisition of Vue Cinemas and KKR’s purchase of Pets At Home. But it was the sale of football club Aston Villa’s sale to Chinese businessman Tony Xia that gave him his biggest profile while he was at BAML. He also advised on the sale of EMI which, as he recalls, sadly ended up in an aggressive court case between Citi and Terra Firma, the private equity firm which acquired EMI.
At Cardean Bell he has been able to focus on a select group of high stakes projects with a rigorous, analytical approach. In 2019 he advised on the sale of a life sciences conference business, Hanson Wade, to a private equity firm, having been a non-executive on the board for the prior three years. More recently he advised the entrepreneur, Simon Moores, at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence which provides prices and supply chain data to the lithium ion battery supply chain, arranging the sale of a 20 per cent stake to Spectrum Private Equity.
“It was interesting because it’s a very high growth area,” he comments. “What I love about my work is that I never stop learning. Each project is different, lasting from 3 months to 12 months. There’s always a different angle to try and exploit. And obviously one has to market the businesses on the sell side to the buyers, and that can be quite challenging sometimes. So developing that investment case, that investment story, is always immersive.”
Sturgeon Ventures
Sturgeon Ventures has been incubating Peter as a corporate financial adviser since Cardean Bell’s inception in 2016. “It’s very helpful to have the Sturgeon team take much of the regulatory burden away from me and my team, so that we can focus on revenue generation and making sure that we’re doing the best that we can for our clients,” he says.
“Sturgeon are completely up to date on the regulatory hoops we need to complete for bringing on new clients, and for giving the advice and ensuring that we stay fully trained, so it’s invaluable to have their support. For a small business like mine, it’s a great deal of work to become directly authorised, and I like the fact that I can get support directly from Seonaid and her team rather than having to think about regulation and compliance constantly.”
History buff
Away from the corporate world, like many former history students, Peter still has an avid interest in the subject. He is Chair of the Chalke History Trust and a co-founder of the internationally renowned Chalke History Festival in Wiltshire. “It started by accident 13 years ago when an old university friend of mine, the best-selling WWII historian James Holland, persuaded me to become the treasurer of the local village cricket club where we both live. It was only then that he told me he actually wanted to raise a large sum of money to move the cricket pitch from one field to another and build a pavilion,” he says with a laugh.
“It’s difficult if not impossible to move a cricket pitch, but he managed to persuade a local farmer to give us a home field for 100 years for free. And we then needed to raise money to turn a stony field into a proper cricket pitch and one of the crazy fundraising ideas was a history festival. It was remarkably successful and, having started from humble beginnings, it’s now the largest history festival in the UK, educating people about the past so they can think about the present and plan for the future. It’s great fun.”
The festival attracts more than 25,000 visitors with over 250 history talks and living history displays in a not-for-profit charitable model. It’s been so successful it has spawned a membership club with livestreaming talks, starting with an inaugural interview with US presidential candidate Senator James Webb. Although Peter is no longer directly involved in the day to day running, he can still indulge his love of the past when he’s not making successful deals for Cardean Bell’s clients, supported strongly by Seonaid and her team at Sturgeon Ventures.
