Plugged In and Focused
Cesar Gueikian, MBA ’03, an accomplished musician with a great personal love for Gibson guitars, has led a turnaround of the iconic brand.
- By
- April 22, 2026
- Media, Entertainment, and Sports
Cesar Gueikian, MBA ’03, is sitting in a refurbished train car that has been outfitted for his use as a cigar lounge—a getaway unknown to all but a few people. He retreats to this private space whenever he wants to clear his head, free of interruption, or simply reflect.
“It’s this little spot that I have,” he says of the car, which sits adjacent to Cummins Station in Nashville’s central business district. Originally erected as a railway warehouse in 1900, Cummins Station became home to Gibson Garage, the flagship store of Gibson Brands, in 2021—a year after Gueikian joined the iconic guitar maker as chief merchant officer. He’s now the president and CEO.
Today, Gibson is in a position of strength following a turnaround that Gueikian navigated with focus, clarity, and edge. And although he may have steered the brand through a perilous stretch in recent history, he looks pretty chill at the moment, sitting in a light-gray cardigan at one end of the rectangular corridor, a coveted Gibson Les Paul “Burst” mounted on the wall behind him. The electric guitar, with its gold and dark amber body, is a near replica of those played by some of the greatest guitarists of all time, including Jimmy Page, Joe Perry, and Slash—all of whom Gueikian calls friends.
Gueikian’s career has been a journey of connections that have landed him where he is today: the envy of anyone who ever dreamed of sharing the stage (and phone numbers) with a who’s who of Rock & Roll Hall of Famers. During his childhood in 1980s Argentina, he got his first taste of business helping out his entrepreneur father. He also learned to play the guitar, an early introduction to a lifelong passion. From there, undergraduate studies in Buenos Aires and an MBA from Chicago Booth carried him to the trading floors of Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and UBS. He went on to launch his own private equity firm, Melody Capital Partners, and ultimately took the helm of the legendary guitar brand, which had nearly collapsed under $500 million in debt.
When Gibson filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2018, it looked like the end of an era. The company had strayed from its core guitar business into an ill-fated consumer-electronics diversification. But Gueikian, who’d been quietly buying up the company’s distressed debt, saw an opportunity that blended his Booth training in special-situations investing with his love for music and guitars—specifically Gibson guitars.
Eight years later, Gibson is focused and profitable—with a clear mission of manufacturing the highest-quality instruments in its history, Gueikian says. The company’s turnaround offers a master class in focused strategy, operational excellence, and the kind of patient-capital thinking that Gueikian traces back to his days at Booth.
Guiding Principles
Cesar Gueikian grew up in Buenos Aires, the son of second-generation Armenian immigrants. His core principles and hardscrabble work ethic are all Armenian, he says, emphasizing that he’s an Armenian Argentine. “I grew up in Argentina, and I grew up with Armenian culture,” he says.
Part of that fierce identity has to do with the history of his people and the stain of what some scholars consider the first genocide of the 20th century. In 1915–16, an estimated 1.5 million people were killed or died from inhumane treatment as part of the Ottoman Empire’s attempt at ethnic cleansing, an account that Turkey contests. Gueikian’s great-grandparents, who were teenagers at the time, made it out alive—though few of their siblings did—and their legacy endures.
At age 49, inspired by the experiences of his ancestors, Gueikian approaches each new day as a gift. Remembering their stories has helped shape his values.
“The Armenian community I grew up in has a history of sacrifice,” Gueikian says. “You put in a lot of effort, make no complaints, and then earn the fruits of your labor—that’s the Armenian way.”
Gueikian notes that these values also serve as a template for how to treat employees.
“At Gibson, we don’t focus on where someone’s from, what they look like, or their accent,” he says. “What matters is character: Are you a good person? This perspective, rooted in an understanding of historical persecution, guides how we treat everyone here.”
Growing up, Gueikian spent a lot of time in his father’s business, which sold Hallmark cards and character merchandise—including of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Woodstock from the Peanuts comic strip—for which his father had obtained the South American licenses. At only 10 years old, Gueikian shadowed his father and sold the licensed merchandise directly to customers, building an understanding of the entertainment industry, intellectual property, and entrepreneurship.
“My father’s business enabled a lot of people to have jobs and raise families, so I learned about all of that from a very young age,” Gueikian says. “Seeing other people succeed was highly fulfilling.”
“At Gibson, we don’t focus on where someone’s from, what they look like, or their accent. What matters is character: Are you a good person?”
— Cesar Gueikian
Simultaneously, Gueikian’s father was deriving his own fulfillment from watching Cesar excel on guitar.
“He had a collection of vinyl records,” Gueikian says of his dad. “He used to play Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and the Stones. But he also had a record that was still in its original wrapping. The band was called Black Sabbath, the album was Black Sabbath, and there was a song called ‘Black Sabbath.’ I listened to that song, and I was like, ‘I need to learn how to do this.’”
Gueikian is one of four siblings. His parents didn’t have the resources to buy him a Gibson SG electric guitar like the one Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi played. Instead, he honed his chops on an old Spanish acoustic guitar that was lying around the house.
Little did he know that he would come to own close to 200 guitars—or that Iommi would turn into a close friend and musical collaborator. (In 2023, Gueikian wrote, recorded, and produced the single “Deconstruction” with Iommi and Serj Tankian, front man for the band System of a Down and an Armenian American. They called themselves the Gibson Band and donated the proceeds to the Armenia Fund.)
But to make all that happen, Gueikian needed an electric guitar. Fortunately, at age 13, he won a tennis tournament in Miami as part of a pre-ATP tour of the United States. Although the prize money wasn’t enough to buy the Gibson guitar he wanted, he was able to purchase a Fender Stratocaster, which he turned around and sold at a profit in Argentina within a few weeks. At the next opportunity, he returned to Miami to buy a Gibson Les Paul Standard. It was his first in what would grow to become an impressive vintage collection.
Parallel Tracks
As transformative as the guitar was for Gueikian, the tennis tour itself proved even more life changing by giving him his first look at the US. Because so much of his father’s work involved US intellectual property, Gueikian held an almost mythic view of the country, and had always planned to one day live and pursue a career in business there.
He says, “For me to be able to have access to the business world in the US and Europe meant having some form of education in the US that would open doors.”
Gueikian remained in South America for college, completing his undergraduate degree at the University of San Andrés, but while he was there he got to know faculty members with PhDs from the University of Chicago. This, along with his ongoing interest in the markets, led him to Chicago Booth for graduate school.
“My dad began with nothing but a loan to start him out, and he created a really good business,” Gueikian says. “I wanted to go to a school that would have that as part of their philosophy but also provide access to other things. I loved behavioral economics in the markets. I learned about all of that at Booth.”
He says he also learned that “there’s always a good balance between efficiency and inefficiency, and there are many ways to capture inefficiencies, particularly in the private markets. I got really interested in how we can influence businesses, private businesses, in ways that you really cannot do in the public markets. And that’s why I became so interested in the private equity world. I got that when I was at the University of Chicago.”
After graduating from Booth with concentrations in Analytical Finance and Economics, Gueikian moved to London to join Deutsche Bank, relocating to New York after four years. Later, he headed illiquid credit trading for North America at Merrill Lynch. Next came UBS, where he served as global head of the special-situations group and head of leveraged capital markets for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa beginning in 2009.
“I had enough of a background, enough of a track record, and a really amazing team that I could take to launch my own business.”
— Cesar Gueikian
That same year, a mutual friend connected Gueikian with Henry Juszkiewicz, then-CEO of Gibson Brands. “My friend told Juszkiewicz, ‘There’s this crazy guy in New York who has a massive Gibson collection. You guys should meet.’” Over the next few years, Gueikian visited Juszkiewicz multiple times at the company’s headquarters in Nashville, and the two met up a few times in New York. “He wanted to bounce ideas around,” Gueikian says.
In his talks with Gueikian, Juszkiewicz discussed potential ways to drive top-line growth for Gibson. As someone who had fallen in love with Gibson guitars at an early age, Gueikian felt a kinship with the brand, which had fallen on hard times. “I so wanted to see Gibson succeed,” he says.
One of Juszkiewicz’s ideas was to deviate from Gibson’s flagship operations in guitar making and invest heavily in the consumer audio business—a premise that didn’t sit well with Gueikian. “I thought it would take focus away from Gibson’s high-margin, high-brand-equity guitar business and diminish its incredible history,” he says. Sure that the move was a mistake, he respectfully passed on investing.
Against Gueikian’s counsel, Gibson acquired a majority stake in Onkyo USA in 2012. A year later, the company purchased TEAC Corporation for $52 million, gaining a 54 percent ownership stake in the Japanese manufacturer.
Meanwhile, at 35, Gueikian resigned from UBS and cofounded Melody Capital Partners along with Omar Jaffrey and Andres Scaminaci, who had both reported to him at UBS. Although Gueikian had followed a common post-Booth trajectory—stints at top banks—he had always intended to strike out on his own, following his father’s entrepreneurial example. His roles in special-situations investing weren’t detours but deliberate steps in his timeline.
After three years at UBS, Gueikian says, “I came to that moment where I thought that I had enough of a background, enough of a track record, and a really amazing team that I could take to launch my own business, just like my father had done.”
Gueikian served as Melody’s managing director from 2012 to 2017. While focusing on situations in which Melody could influence outcomes through its investment positions, Gueikian and his Melody partners raised just under $2 billion and launched Melody Telecom Infrastructure, a specialized investment firm that built and managed portfolios of wireless-communication assets before its 2021 acquisition.
Not only was it his first billion-dollar exit, but it also gave him a platform to practice what Harry L. Davis, the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Distinguished Service Professor of Creative Management Emeritus, had taught him at Booth: how to influence company outcomes through strategic investment positions. Through it all, music remained a parallel track. He was collecting vintage Gibsons, playing in bands with colleagues such as Nat Zilkha (who would later become Gibson’s executive chairman), and monitoring the guitar maker’s journey from his perch on Wall Street.
Reading the Cues
Keeping a close eye on privately held Gibson and still at Melody, Gueikian started buying up the company’s debt to gain access to financial reporting. He also reached out to Zilkha—then a partner at the private equity firm KKR—to gauge his interest in doing the same. Zilkha, too, was a guitarist (and a former member of the alt-country band Red Rooster) and saw an opportunity to help turn around an iconic brand, so KKR also began buying distressed debt from existing bondholders.
As Gueikian had anticipated, Gibson’s market-expansion strategy proved inauspicious. By 2016, Moody’s Investors Service had downgraded Gibson Brands’ credit to junk status, citing “weak operating results.” Two years later, Gibson filed for Chapter 11 protection with more than half a billion dollars of debt on its balance sheet.
As one of Gibson’s biggest lenders, KKR took control during the bankruptcy process. Along with a group of minority investors, including Gueikian, KKR acquired Gibson Brands in November 2018.
Every musician knows the importance of cues, and this was Gueikian’s. With an ownership stake, the business and guitar whiz now had an iconic company to help run. Installed as the chief merchant officer, Gueikian wasted no time “beginning to reorganize the operations of the company and redo the portfolio architecture.”
With Zilkha as chairman, Gueikian ascended from chief merchant officer to brand president to interim CEO to president and CEO in less than five years. “We embarked on a process of establishing really high work standards,” Gueikian says. “Our factories combine modern-day manufacturing principles with craftsmanship. So one day I came up with the term craftories, and it stuck.”
Under Gueikian’s guidance, Gibson consolidated its manufacturing facilities, or craftories, and shuttered its operations in Memphis. At the same time, Gibson recommitted to maintaining facilities in Nashville, for electric guitars; Bozeman, Montana, for acoustic guitars; and Qingdao, China, for Epiphone-branded guitars. In 2022, the Bozeman location more than doubled in size, creating hundreds of new job opportunities.
“‘Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies improve by them,’” Gueikian says, quoting Andy Grove, former president, CEO, and chairman of Intel, who famously steered the tech giant through a tough patch in the 1990s when its Pentium chip was found to have a bug.
“As CEO, I get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions and put the right people in the right seats.”
— Cesar Gueikian
A key to Gibson’s successful comeback was abandoning the diversification strategy to focus more on quality and ensure that instruments have off-the-shelf playability—a previous customer sore spot.
“A lot of times people will think, ‘We’ll sacrifice quality to make more money,’ and I always think the complete opposite,” Gueikian says. “I think investing in processes that are going to lead to higher quality are going to ultimately—maybe not in the short term, but in the medium and long terms—lead to reductions in variance, reductions in rework, reductions in touchpoints.”
Gibson is now financially healthy and profitable, operating without a massive debt burden or loss-making divisions. According to a 2023 National Association of Music Merchants survey of US music store owners, Gibson leads the US guitar market with 34 percent of annual sales, followed by Fender with 30 percent.
Gueikian says his goal is to “make Gibson the most relevant, most played, and most loved music company in the world.
“We have a different balance sheet today than we had in 2018,” he adds. “We are in a position of strength for the things that we want to do. That’s a pretty significant competitive advantage in the market.”
He notes that when it comes to failure, what matters are the lessons you can take from the experiences. He hearkens back to how he felt competing on the tennis court as a teenager. “You’re losing. What are you going to do? What have you learned about your opponent during the game while you’re losing that could give you an edge?”
Issues with his knees and elbows have forced Gueikian to give up tennis, but he’s traded in one racket for another and now plays padel regularly.
“That comes back also to my upbringing and that Armenian way of working,” he says. “The Armenian approach is that you’re always going to fail—the question is, what do you do with it? What do you do with that failure experience? And I’ve always been one to learn from it, pick myself back up, and then go and do something different.
“As CEO, I get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions and put the right people in the right seats,” he says. “People only see the decisions you made, not the choices you had.”