Haitham Wahab
Founder, SKL Advisors
Corporate finance advisor. Principal investor. Former CEO.
Haitham’s career has moved through three distinct postures — institutional banker, entrepreneurial advisor, and principal investor and CEO. Each one shaped how he advises today.
For the better part of twelve years, he worked at the highest levels of corporate finance — first as a senior corporate finance and advisory professional at JP Morgan in New York and London, advising multinational corporations on transactions totaling billions of dollars, and then as a founding team member at Daroth Capital Advisors, where the work shifted toward something closer to what SKL Advisors does today. At Daroth, the clients were entrepreneurs and owner-operators: a defense-focused technology company that needed growth capital for a roll-up acquisition strategy, a well-established privately owned diversified media company looking for an orderly exit, companies navigating the complexity of their first institutional transaction.
Then he went further still.
He joined the management team of a specialized mid-market company in the in-flight entertainment industry, structured and led a management buy-out, and spent the following seven years as its principal investor and CEO. He restructured operations, exited underperforming segments, and drove a full transformation to digital content provisioning — navigating the COVID-19 period and integration with a new corporate parent along the way.
The company was ultimately sold to a strategic acquirer at a return in excess of twenty times invested capital.
That arc — banker, entrepreneurial advisor, principal investor and CEO, and back — is rare. It is also the foundation of SKL Advisors: every conversation he has with an owner-operator is informed by having sat where they sit.
Haitham Wahab holds a B.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics. He has worked extensively across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, with cross-border experience reflected in both transactions and organizational engagements. He is a fluent speaker of multiple languages.