Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, a south Louisiana native and former executive vice president and global treasurer of Walmart Stores Inc., has joined Bernhard Capital Partners as an operating partner.
She is one of two top hires to join the Baton Rouge-based private equity firm, which focuses on investments in the energy services sector. Ali Azad, former president and CEO of Toshiba America Energy Systems, has also joined BCP as an operating partner.
“Both Claire and Ali have exceptional business experience and I look forward to working with both as we continue to grow and expand BCP’s portfolio of services business,” says BCP Founder and Partner Jim Bernhard, who established BCP after retiring from The Shaw Group in the wake of its 2013 acquisition by CB&I.
The addition of Babineaux-Fontenot and Azad expands the breadth and depth of BCP’s executive team, which was originally composed mostly of former executives of The Shaw Group and Wall Street financiers.
Babineaux-Fontenot—an African-American woman who started her career at Adams and Reese in Baton Rouge in the early 2000s—says BCP is making a conscious decision to increase its diversity of experience and perspective.
“Jim wants to grow and he wants to win and he knows that to win they are going to have to become more diverse,” she says. “Every team I’ve ever been on has become more diverse … and has won more once I was there. I am not anybody’s window dressing. The fact that they brought me in means they want to add voices. They want to add chairs to the table.”
Babineaux-Fontenot says her role as an operating partner will be fluid, and that she envisions herself participating in a number of ways—from evaluating the health and viability of potential investments to evaluating holdings already owned by BCP to serving on the boards of portfolio companies.
“We’re not going to start the relationship by limiting it,” she says. “We’re going to start it by exploring possibilities.”
BCP currently has four portfolio companies that it has been growing over the past three years—ATC, Bernhard LLC, Brown and Root and Epic Piping.
BCP raised more than $750 million in commitments from major institutional investors through its first fund, the Energy Services Fund, which closed in June 2016.
It reportedly launched a second fund in May. The Bernhard Services Fund II is targeting $1 billion, according to the trade publication pehub.com. BCP declines to comment on the status of the firm’s fundraising activity.
—Stephanie Riegel
