Craig Cognetti
Senior Advisor
Cambridge Family Enterprise Group
Craig Cognetti
Mr. Craig Cognetti is a senior advisor at Cambridge Advisors to Family Enterprise, a highly specialized global advisory firm serving family enterprises. Cambridge Advisors and Cambridge Institute for Family Enterprise, an education and research institute, are divisions of Cambridge Family Enterprise Group, a global organization founded in 1989. It is devoted to helping families and ownership groups navigate the new economy and achieve multigenerational success for their families, enterprises, and financial wealth.
Mr. Cognetti advises family enterprise owners on their total wealth strategies, including corporate assets, financial investments, M&A, and corporate finance. He helps owners explore and identify their wealth objectives, vision, and strategy for the future of their assets. A core dimension of Mr. Cognetti’s work is to help families, including next generation members, build the understandings, capabilities, and confidence to make wise strategic decisions about how to invest their capital to grow wealth across generations.
Mr. Cognetti integrates his research capabilities and expertise in corporate finance to analyze family companies and portfolios and their industries, competitive landscapes, financial investments, and risk exposure. With this analysis, he educates ownership groups and facilitates conversations and processes that lead the owners to understand what they own, where value within their enterprise is being created today, and where it can be created in the future. He supports family owners in the execution of their total wealth strategies, which can include considering acquisitions and divestitures, diversification, experimentation into new growth areas, private equity, direct investing, and funding early-stage companies of interest to the next generation.
Mr. Cognetti’s career spans 30 years and includes corporate strategy, investment banking, and private equity portfolio management. He has served on the boards of portfolio companies was CEO of Avalon Acquisition Corp, a publicly owned special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Mr. Cognetti was a partner at Grail Partners, an investment firm focused on the financial services sector. During his 17 years at Grail, Mr. Cognetti led the firm’s private equity practice and was deeply involved in the firm’s M&A practice. As part of Grail’s M&A practice, Mr. Cognetti advised family- and entrepreneur-led businesses and large financial services companies on various M&A and fundraising transactions.
Prior to joining Grail in 2006, Mr. Cognetti was with a New York City-based alternative investment firm Chelsey Capital. Before that, he was at Mellon Ventures, the $1.4 billion private equity division of Mellon Financial. Mr. Cognetti served in the Corporate Strategy and Development group at Mellon Financial, working with executive management on M&A transactions. He led an initiative to increase Mellon’s presence in separate accounts and built an alternative asset management platform. Early in his career, Mr. Cognetti was in senior management at TRL, a transportation services company.
Mr. Cognetti has a BS in Business Administration from Georgetown University, and an MBA from The Wharton School. He has completed the International Finance and Management program at Oxford University and is a CFA Charterholder.
