Our positioning in the investment funds industry
We assist investment funds in their buying and selling operations as well as in improving performance of their investment lines.
We address all types of investment funds (seed, venture capital, development capital, transmission capital,...) including business angels funds.
Our experiences
strategy & organisation
“Buy-side”, we participate in due diligence. These missions are not a substitute for legal, tax and environmental due diligence, but they supplement them with a diagnosis on the reliability of information, particularly in internal reporting and credibility of the proposed business plan. Very often, this diagnosis sheds light on the quality of the company's operations and its monitoring and, as a corollary, confirms its capacity to ensure the expected growth.
Our "sell-side" support includes the formalization of teasers and info memos, documentation of data rooms as well as the drafting of business plans/scenarios in collaboration with the fund's teams and, if necessary, those of the investment line concerned by the disposal.
Improving performance
Our support in terms of performance improvement obviously concerns investment lines, as these are growing companies with strong needs in terms of
process optimization and
reliable monitoring.
Our know-how and our experience refer for many of our missions to the
improvement of the WCR, the
implementation of cash flow forecasts,
creation of a cash pool or the
securing of reporting figures by generally including more physical indicators. Other services are sometimes carried out such as the recognition of the turnover, the
reduction of the time for drafting account, the
reorganization of the budgetary cycle or the
calculation/challenge of the cost prices when it is about
manufacturing.
Management of transformation
Within investment lines, projects for transforming organizations and modernizing tools are just as numerous and relevant as within companies where funds are absent from capital.
Indeed, managing the transformation itself consists in
monitoring projects with an organizational vocation (resulting from an internal will or consecutive to a change in the scope of activity) or
projects with an information system vocation. We have a recognized know-how in
project management in both cases, based on proven methods and tools.
Monitoring the transformation of the organization is directly linked to the target organization. For instance, this type of support particularly fit an investment line on which the investment fund is seeking to carry out various build-ups.
Transformation management in the context of an ERP implementation, a business tool implementation, a change of database or a digitization of process (work flow, EDM, etc.) is also part of our offer for private equity funds' investment lines.
Our offer is completed by
change management.
Some convictions
Due diligence are often broad but take little account of the reliability of the figures
Even if it generates reactions from the auditors in charge of the due diligence of the accounts, we believe that, like many companies, the
reporting is not always, if not often, conform to the reality of things. By way of illustration, during a due diligence period, the reporting of the "turnover pipe" for instance, the level of late payment or the number of documents produced are not necessarily verified / controlled.
Similarly, business plans (often presented in the form of scenarios) do not seem sufficiently confronted with the company's "capacity to do": can we really achieve 20% growth with no increase of the commercial workforce? Is the business really scalable? Or will the machine utilization time not be saturated in the face of a production increase scenario?
Our support insists on bringing the "data" closer to physical reality of the underlying systems.
Despite the relatively recent presence of operating partners within private equity funds, there is a need for more in-depth performance improvement measures
True, the role of an operating partner is more or less similar to that of an experienced consultant in charge of performance improvement. But it seems to us that this role is hampered by the very fact of belonging to the specific shareholder that is the fund, and that the neutrality of his investigations may be open to discusion. In addition, in-depth studies involve manipulation of large databases that need to be made reliable. This work is time-consuming and often incompatible with the way of doing things of an operating partner.
In these cases, our support becomes the support of the operating partner.
How to get around the difficulty of a specific shareholder who gives the impression of imposing himself on executive management
This is a common theme among investment funds. Wanting to be "hands on" without imposing this or that operational choice to the executive management. This subject is also true for budgetary matters.
One way of doing this - among any others - as we have experienced it, is for the fund to handle the diagnosis (on the quality of a process, on the management of working capital requirements, on the good knowledge of a tool...), which is by the way often scheduled in the shareholders' agreements. It is then up to us to convince the managers of the need for support in implementing the recommendations.
