Clinton Johnston

About

In his many roles, Mr. Johnston has worked as an outside advisor, an in-house team member, and an owner on both purchases and sales of different businesses. His education is similarly diverse, with a Bachelor of Science with High Honors in Government from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, a Master of Arts in Latin American Economics from New York University, a Juris Doctorate Cum Laude from Harvard Law School, and a Master of Science in Finance from the University of Tampa from which he graduated first in his class with a perfect grade point average. He started in mergers and acquisitions as an attorney on Wall Street, working on publicly traded and bulge bracket deals. He moved from larger to smaller markets and across continents, having lived and worked in Europe, Asia, South America and North America. The majority of his work has focused on cross-border transactions. Additionally, he has been a lecturer at three universities on subjects including negotiation, finance, and business law.

Clinton truly enjoys the work we do. He supports the Transaction Teams and assists on particularly challenging or significant deals. Using his decades of experience, he often drops into transactions to which he can add extra value. He works to ensure uniformity of service levels across large portions of clients’ businesses and tracks best practices and regulatory changes in the M&A world to assure that Benchmark remains on the cutting edge of the industry and continues to deliver the highest quality service to our clients.

Success

Clinton takes pride in strengthening the deal prep process. As the market has got more complex, buyers are increasingly bringing complex concepts from the larger markets down to the middle markets. The Benchmark International process must keep up with these buyer habits and expectations. Since the integration of a more buyer-focused approach to this part of the process, Benchmark International has increased the client education role of team members working on this stage. Both initiatives have resulted in more closings, faster closings, higher transaction values, and happier clients.