Franco Scalamandre
Franco Scalamandre is the President and Founder of Sterling Atlantic (www.statl.com). Sterling Atlantic and its affiliates are institutional investors partnered with the world’s premier financial institutions to provide equity capital to middle market and small-cap companies worldwide. Sterling specializes in innovative solutions in the areas of public company finance, buy-out finance, growth capital, and joint ventures with global partners. Their affiliated funds have over $2.5 billion under management, a local team on 4 continents, and have completed over 200 transactions in over 25 countries.
Mr. Scalamandre has been involved in the global capital markets for 35 years. He is an expert on regional exchanges and cross-border transactions and has been the CEO of various financial companies for over 20 years. He has managed small businesses with international distribution and has financed hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate, early stage ventures, and large scale international infrastructure projects.
Mr. Scalamandre began his capital markets career as a teenager working summers as a specialist clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. At Walter N. Frank & Co., Mr. Scalamandre worked in the head specialist clerk position and handled such heavily traded tech stocks as Digital Equipment and Data General, as well as other industries represented by stocks such as Bristol Meyers, American Electric Power, and Winnebago.
Mr. Scalamandre received his Bachelor of Arts degree Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in 1979. His honors thesis topic was “Price Vacillation- A New Look at Marketability on the New York Stock Exchange” in which he completed a full scale computer model of exchange stock trading including an electronic specialist in order to analyze the effect of the specialist system on liquidity and pricing efficiency. He was awarded the Harvard Scholarship for "Academic Distinction of the Highest Achievement during the Academic Year."
At Andrex Development Company, Mr. Scalamandre was involved in the financing of significant real estate development projects and negotiated transactions with financial institutions such as Wells Fargo Bank ($250 million redevelopment project financing), Teachers Life Insurance ($45 million asset sale), Coast Savings Bank ($35 million construction financing), and others. In the early 1980s, he developed spreadsheet models on Lotus 123 to enable sensitivity analysis of construction interest reserves, rent rates, and lease-up rates which modeling capabilities were previously unknown to Andrex’s institutional lenders and equity partners.
Mr. Scalamandre also successfully dealt with the very adverse real estate markets of the early 1980s. In Carlsbad, California, he took over management of a $30 million vacant asset, fired the incumbent veteran brokers, and replaced them with newcomers who hustled to find live tenants in a market with very little leasing activity. After the first transaction, he quickly completed transactions with Hughes Aircraft and then Taylor Made Golf, at the time the largest lease transaction in the history of North County San Diego. He has also completed transactions with tenants such as TRW, Pacific Bell Telephone, Ashton Tate Software, and Eskimo Pie Corporation.
Mr. Scalamandre then founded Franklin Financial which invested in and arranged investment capital for small cap companies in the financial services, consumer goods, and technology industries, including some early stage ventures such as General Grinding. General Grinding had designed a micronizer which enables the fine grinding of hard materials without impacting the material and with very low energy and maintenance expense. The inexpensive fine grinding of coal and limestone enables high sulfur coal to be burnt with the emission characteristics of natural gas. Mr. Scalamandre arranged the prototype development financing in a joint venture with Texas New Mexico Power, a New York Stock Exchange utility. Franklin Financial also founded and funded DM International, a direct marketing company with sales in over 20 countries.
Mr. Scalamandre founded Sterling Atlantic with Harpal Randhawa several years prior to Sarbanes Oxley with the initial investment thesis that US public markets were structurally impaired for small cap companies due to the companies’ inability to obtain meaningful research coverage. Mr. Randhawa is the founder of the GEM Group, Sabre Capital, and Antfactory Limited. Sterling Atlantic is currently investing primarily outside the United States and has significant inter-regional trading relationships and infrastructure projects in development in addition to its small and mid cap equity investments.
Mr. Scalamandre is named after his grandfather Franco Scalamandre, the founder of Scalamandre Silks, Inc.
