Lorand Minyo established Minyo & Co to advise owners, boards and investors on businesses in difficulty, on regulated markets, and on cross-border transactions and partnerships. Over twenty-six years he has run operations for businesses above $400m in annual recurring revenue and taken a nine-figure operation through a regulatory turnaround to a clean exit, and he accepts only a limited number of mandates.
Every approach is held in strict confidence from the first conversation onwards.
Most clients come to us with advisers already in place, lawyers, accountants and bankers each responsible for one part of the problem. We work between them, take responsibility for the situation as a whole, and see it through.
Our work falls into two parts, which are frequently stages of a single engagement.
We are asked to act when an operation is failing, when a regulator has begun to take an interest, when a platform can no longer carry the business built upon it, or when losses have outrun any explanation of them. In such circumstances we take charge of the operation, restore stability and remain engaged until the business is secure.
We also act for clients who need to secure a manufacturing partner, enter a new market, raise capital, acquire a competitor or sell a business, often in jurisdictions where they have no relationships of their own. We identify and qualify the right counterparty, gain access to the people who decide, structure the arrangement and negotiate it through to signature.
Lorand Minyo
Founder & Principal
Lorand Minyo began his career in 2000 and has since held senior commercial and operating roles across e-commerce, regulated gaming, financial technology, healthcare, renewable energy, robotics and defence.
Having started in go-to-market, he has remained close to the commercial side of the businesses he has led, negotiating the partnerships, distribution arrangements and payment relationships on which they depended. As chief operating officer and then chief executive of a regulated technology platform, he built the operational and compliance infrastructure that carried the business across several jurisdictions and past $400m in annual recurring revenue, led a nine-figure operation through a turnaround under regulatory pressure, and completed a clean exit. Earlier he co-founded a cosmetics manufacturer, a video-recognition product and a healthcare company.
Born and raised in Transylvania, he works internationally and speaks English, Romanian, Hungarian and Italian.
Record
Most engagements draw on more than one of these disciplines, not least because a business is so often put right in order to be sold.
Turnaround, restructuring and interim leadership: assuming responsibility for an operation in difficulty, establishing the causes, and managing it until it can once again stand on its own. The work extends through the period in which cash, staff and customers are all in motion at once.
Licensing, compliance frameworks, multi-jurisdiction operations and payment provider relationships are where regulated businesses most often come to grief. Lorand Minyo has run a business subject to all four and answered to its supervisors directly, so the judgement offered here comes from having carried the obligation himself.
Finding and securing the counterparties a business needs in order to grow, whether a manufacturing or supply partner, an offtaker, a licensee or distributor, or the person inside an organisation with the authority to decide, and very often across a border the client has not crossed before. This can be the whole of an engagement, and is often how a longer relationship begins.
Advice on either side of a transaction: preparing the business for market, identifying and qualifying counterparties, conducting the process, and negotiating terms until the deal closes.
Raising equity and debt, from preparing the business and its materials to shaping the approach and managing the sequence in which investors and lenders are contacted. Where a jurisdiction requires an authorised intermediary to arrange or place capital, one is appointed to do so.
An honest assessment of what a technology business has built: the state of the platform, what it costs to operate, the credibility of the roadmap, and whether the engineering can support the commercial plan, which is as useful to a buyer in diligence as it is to an owner preparing to go to market.
The experience behind this work spans regulated gaming, financial technology and payments, software and applied artificial intelligence, healthcare and life sciences, defence and autonomous systems, robotics, e-commerce, energy, biotechnology, manufacturing and professional services.
Occasional notes on regulated markets, operations under strain, and what changes hands when a business is sold.
When a regulator arrives, what it sets out to establish is whether the operation can evidence its own behaviour: who approved what, on what basis, and how quickly that can be shown. Platforms tend to fail supervision on record-keeping and escalation well before any question of policy arises, which is why preparing for it is largely a matter of making an organisation legible to itself.
A business in trouble presents every problem at once, and the instinct is to turn to whichever seems most frightening. The order that works is less dramatic: cash first, because it buys the time in which everything else can be done; then the operation, since a business that cannot deliver will not be rescued by a narrative; and the story last, once the first two have made it true, which is precisely the sequence that failed turnarounds so often reverse.
A company built inside a licensing regime usually sells at a discount, which its owners tend to resent and which buyers justify by the risk that the licence, the payment relationships or the compliance record will not survive a change of control. In my experience most of that discount can be recovered, but only through work done in the eighteen months before a sale process begins.
An initial conversation carries no fee and no obligation on either side. We use it to understand what you are trying to achieve, to say whether we are the right firm for it, and to give you a view on what the work would involve.
Scope, duration, fees and expenses are agreed in writing before work begins. Fee structures vary with the instruction and commonly combine a retainer with a fee payable on completion.
We treat an approach as confidential from the first contact, do not publish our engagements or name clients and counterparties to third parties, and will sign a non-disclosure agreement at whatever point you would like one.
Most engagements run alongside a client's existing advisers, and we coordinate with them, share what they need and leave their relationships intact.
We stay with an engagement after heads of terms are agreed and through diligence, documentation and closing, the period in which a substantial share of the work in any transaction falls.
At any given time we hold mandates that range from the sale or purchase of a company to the search for the counterparties on which a business depends: a manufacturing partner in East Asia for a European engineering firm, an offtake buyer in the Gulf for a gold producer, a distributor or licensee in a country the client has never entered, or the investor best suited to a particular asset. Much of this work is carried out across borders, and very few of these engagements are ever advertised.
If you are looking for a partner, a supplier, a buyer, an investor or a way into a new market, or you hold a business, an asset or a capability that others may need, we would be glad to hear what you have in mind. Where one of our mandates corresponds to it, we will tell you so, and no introduction is made without the consent of both parties.
A brief note describing the situation, what you need to achieve and where matters currently stand is enough to begin the conversation.
Minyo & Co acts for clients internationally, working through a private network of partners and specialists in the centres below and in more than thirty further countries. They are brought into a mandate when it calls for local access, particular technical expertise or standing in a given jurisdiction.
Brazil
São Paulo
China
Beijing
Egypt
Cairo
Israel
Tel Aviv
Japan
Tokyo
Saudi Arabia
Riyadh
Singapore
Singapore
South Korea
Seoul
Switzerland
Zurich
United Arab Emirates
Dubai
United Kingdom
London
United States
New York
Europe
Amsterdam Athens Berlin Budapest Istanbul London Nicosia Paris Rome Warsaw Zurich
Middle East and Africa
Accra Amman Cairo Doha Dubai Johannesburg Lagos Muscat Nairobi Rabat Riyadh Tel Aviv Tunis
Asia-Pacific
Astana Bangkok Beijing Hanoi Jakarta Kuala Lumpur Manila New Delhi Seoul Singapore Sydney Tokyo
Americas
Bogotá Buenos Aires Havana Mexico City New York Panama City Santiago São Paulo Toronto