W. Clifford Atherton Jr., Ph.D., CFA

Managing Director

Cliff is an investment banker with more than 25 years of experience in corporate finance and more than 30 years of experience in teaching finance at the graduate level. He joined GulfStar in 1995 and since that time has completed numerous corporate finance assignments for business owners. Most of Cliff's clients are entrepreneur- and family-owned businesses with enterprise values between $25 and $250 million. His transaction experience is split evenly between sales to strategic buyers and recapitalizations with private equity firms. His industry experience includes representation of upstream, midstream and downstream energy service companies and related manufacturing and distribution companies. Cliff has served full-time and part-time on the faculty of Rice University's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business since 1980 (full-time from 1980 to 1987), where he currently serves as a Professor in the Practice of Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining GulfStar, he was Managing Director of McKenna & Company (1992 to 1995), the president of Emprise Consulting Group, Inc. (1990 to 1992), and an independent consultant (1978 to 1990). He was also an Adjunct Professor of Finance at the University of Houston from 1993 to 1997.