David Sawyer is the Leader of Teneo’s U.S. Financial Advisory business. He has over 30 years of experience in global financial markets as both a principal investor and as a trusted advisor to corporate boards and CEOs.
For a significant portion of his career, David has been active in the distressed debt and restructuring arena with roles ranging from a distressed debt and special situations investor, to a senior lender and active equity owner, to a strategic advisor to a wide range of companies.
David has played an active role as a principal and advisor across multiple creditor classes in global turnaround and restructuring activities across a broad range of industries, including healthcare, energy, media, telecom, restaurants and retail, manufacturing and real estate. He has demonstrated strong leadership skills and has a proven track record of building and developing business plans, organizations, teams and cultures within both distressed and growing organizations. Through his participation on distressed company boards and by leading organizations, he has proven himself as a change agent through successful strategy development and implementation.
Prior to joining Teneo, David was the Head of Special Situations at Golub Capital, a $40BN credit asset manager. In this role he was responsible for setting strategy and driving execution of transactions where Golub would convert all or a portion of its debt into equity, either through in-court or out of court restructuring processes. Additionally, he worked closely with all of the management teams of Golub’s owned portfolio companies to develop short- and long-term strategic plans to improve operations, increase efficiencies and accelerate growth with an ultimate focus on maximizing enterprise value.
David was the Co-Head of Turnaround and Restructuring at Ankura Consulting before joining Golub, where he was instrumental in building the T&R team to over 90 professionals and diversifying their service offerings. While at Ankura, he also founded and acted as the CEO for Ankura Trust Company, which provided indenture trustee and independent third-party loan agency services. David’s career also included over seven years as Global Head of Workouts at Barclays during which time he simultaneously served as Global Head of Portfolio and Counterparty Credit.
David spent several years at Silver Point Capital, a hedge fund in Greenwich, CT before joining Barclays. At Silver Point, he ran the firm’s Restructuring and Portfolio Group which was responsible for leading all the restructuring and workout activities across the firm, including active participations on creditor committees, and managing the firm’s $3 billion private lending portfolio. He was also a member of Silver Point’s Distressed Private Equity Group focused on obtaining control equity positions through fulcrum security investing.
Prior to joining Silver Point, David was a director at Credit Suisse in their workout group with a focus on media, telecom and energy, and before that he held various roles in the risk departments of Société Générale and HSBC focused on leveraged lending.
David is a graduate of Georgetown University.
