Meet Alexander van Aubel – Associate, Business Services

Please tell us a little about yourself and your role

My name is Alexander van Aubel and I’m an Associate in Houlihan Lokey’s Business Services M&A Advisory team in London. I joined HL in early 2019 after graduating from university and a good bit of travelling. I focus on Buy- and Sellside M&A advisory across various Business Services sub-sectors like Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC), Healthcare Services, Environmental Services, and Equipment-as-a-Service.

What is the difference between an Analyst and an Associate?

The main differences are the amount of responsibility that you have, client interaction and strategic thinking you’re required to do. Don’t get me wrong, as an analyst you’ll have a good bit of responsibility and you’ll see loads clients, but full responsibility for the work you do will be with the Associate or Vice President you’re working with. They will also lead the interaction with the client. As an Associate you start to get full responsibility for certain workstreams (like financial models and drafting of certain marketing materials like the teaser and Information Memorandum) and are expected to start thinking about the strategy behind the M&A process you’re running. Although as an analyst you can definitely distinguish yourself from your peers by also giving process strategy some thought and making recommendations about this to your Associate.

What do you enjoy most about working at Houlihan Lokey?

Definitely the colleagues and clients I work with. There’s a lot of young, like-minded people in my team that I really enjoy working and hanging out with. And then there’s a lot of more senior people with loads of experience in my team as well that I can learn a lot from. In terms of clients, I think that one of the big upsides from working in M&A as a junior is that you get to work with some very interesting entrepreneurs and management teams from the outset. I don’t think there’s many jobs where you work with such versatile and impressive clients when you start working as in M&A. Over the past couple of years I’ve had the pleasure of working with some very interesting clients. Like last summer, when we advised on the sale of a company in the TIC space. The two founders of that business managed to grow it from £0 to £300 million of revenue in 3 years! It was really interesting to hear their stories and be part of their journey.

What would be your career highlight so far?

The deal in the TIC space we did last year that I mentioned above. We worked really hard as a team to get that one done and managed to get a great outcome for our client. We then celebrated closing the deal with a trip to Morocco!

Do you have any advice for someone who is considering applying?

Make sure that you get as much as you can out of your internship, it’s really important that you know what a job entails before you accept one. During your internship ask as many questions as you can and also try to work with as many different people as possible. That way you can really get a feel for the work and whether you’ll enjoy doing it full time.