Living My Dreams

Mark Ronald Shenkman grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the home of Slater Mill, and the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in America. From an early age, he was taught by his family that success comes from setting goals and working hard to achieve them.

As the son and grandson of immigrants, he also learned that the United States is a beacon of freedom and opportunity. In the late 1970s, Mark was a trailblazer in the nascent world of junk bonds. Over the decades, he has financed numerous LBOs and entrepreneurs. In 1985, he founded of Shenkman Capital, a privately-owned, asset-management firm specializing in traditional and alternative credit strategies. Along his life’s journey, he has met many influential business executives, Wall Street titans, and prominent political leaders. Nevertheless, he has never lost a sense of himself or his family roots.

Mark Shenkman is best described as a devoted family man, financier, collector, philanthropist, and patriot. His entire life has been grounded in a deep love of family, country, and the free enterprise system.

As Mark often says: “I am living my dreams every day.”

My professional career began in Boston, Massachusetts, which seems a fitting place for a person like me, a passionate student of early-American history. Only an hour’s drive from Pawtucket, Boston is known as the “birthplace of the American Revolution.” Our family often visited Boston’s many historical sites where men like John Adams, Joseph Warren, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere seized the ideas of the age and crafted them into a new society. While I have worked in New York City since 1979, the seeds of my future success were sown among the same spaces inhabited by those Founding Fathers, whose fiery words of freedom and liberty quickly spread far beyond the bustling streets and wharves of Boston.

After my active-duty Army commitment was completed, I moved to Boston, MBA in hand, with the goal of becoming an equity research analyst. Ideally, I wanted to work at Fidelity, but the firm had no interest in interviewing me. Instead, I went to commercial banks that were reputed to have the best training programs, even better than investment banks or brokerage firms. I landed at New England Merchants Bank, an old-line Yankee institution that was founded in 1831. Both its building at 28 State Street and the nearby Boston City Hall were examples of “new Boston,” rising from the demolished Scollay Square. Still, “old Boston” was never far away. Across the street sat the Old State House, built in 1713, where on March 5, 1770, British troops fired on a crowd and killed five civilians. The Boston Massacre became an early rallying cry for American independence.

New England Merchants Bank was redefining itself as a financial institution. I came along at the perfect time. In July 1969, I joined the bank as a trainee at the princely sum of $11,000 a year. After completing the training program and moving through department rotations, I was assigned my first choice, the Trust Department. As a junior equity analyst, I worked alongside a dozen other analysts, all well-educated and highly dedicated to their work. Combing through annual reports, SEC filed documents, and Wall Street brokerage reports, I researched specific companies and presented equity ideas to an investment committee which provided oversight for various trusts. One aspect of the research process involved introducing myself by phone to CFOs. Sometimes these calls led to in-person visits with the company’s senior management.

Meeting senior executives and touring manufacturing plants proved to be an invaluable tool in my investment research. Early in my career, I had the opportunity to visit major companies like Raytheon and Polaroid. If my research identified a promising investment opportunity, I would prepare a report that profiled the company’s product segments, calculated financial ratios, provided a valuation analysis, and finally, a buy, sell, or hold recommendation. I still remember my first presentation to the trust officers of the investment committee—a stern-looking group of men sitting around an imposing board of director’s table. If their facial expressions remained dour throughout the presentation, I knew that my recommendation was “dead on arrival.”