Steve Morrissette‘s career includes large corporate experience in mergers & acquisitions and banking as well as entrepreneurial projects as an investor and founding CEO of several start-up businesses. In addition to 25 years of practitioner expertise, his academic career includes 12 years of full-time teaching and extensive scholarship on entrepreneurial finance including a comprehensive study of angel investors published in the Journal of Private Equity, numerous articles on the banking industry, as well as presentations and journal articles on M&A including a recent presentation on M&A at McKinsey’s Corporate Finance Conference.
Most of his banking career focused on transformation projects, especially through mergers and acquisitions. His M&A experience includes over a dozen projects ranging from small deals with $10 million in sales to a full-time role on the First Chicago-BankOne executive merger integration team, one of the largest financial services mergers at that time. In his various CFO roles (BankOne Commercial Bank, American National Bank of Chicago, First Chicago Regional Bank), he was responsible for M&A and post-merger integration. When Jamie Dimon became CEO, he was asked to serve as head of Strategy & Planning for BankOne Commercial Banking. His M&A experience also includes selling business units, taking his firm public and eventually selling his first company 4 years after going public for a 450% return to investors.
Morrissette has extensive entrepreneurial experience — he has been an angel investor actively involved in the formation of several firms in industries ranging from technology to plumbing parts. He was also the founding CEO of First Community Financial Partners, a bank group with 4 start-up banks having grown from zero to $1 billion in assets in just 7 years. At First Community, he led 5 stock offerings raising over $100 million in equity. As a consultant, his work includes business plan development, strategic planning, performance improvement, turn-around management, management buyouts, and various types of M&A projects.
His academic credentials include a MBA with honors in Finance and Strategy from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Entrepreneurial Finance from Union University. In addition to Booth, he is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL and has guest lectured at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. His current research includes decision models for mergers and acquisitions including “A Framework for Validating and M&A Deal Thesis” published in the Journal of Accountancy and Finance. He also recently published “An Investor’s Guide to Search Funds” in the Journal of Private Equity; the article was co-authored with a Booth student.