…. Some months ago, I argued that formal value creation methodologies – created to address the problems of a less favourable investing environment – could be self-defeating unless balanced by greater attention to how teams and organisations build value in practice (which Catalysis refers to as value enablement.

…. You’ve heard of shrinkflation in consumer products like chocolate bars, drinks and even toilet paper: smaller portions at the same or higher cost. Have you ever considered that the same might be happening with companies being backed by private equity, albeit for different reasons?

…. I suggested recently that private equity investors are involved in building ‘value machines’ built from four components: partnership; governance; expectations; team & organisation strategy.

…. It is often helpful to give labels to new concepts which otherwise stay fuzzy. The problem with fuzzy concepts is that they are hard to visualise, communicate and work on.

…. To have the highest probability of success in enabling value, the investor or Chair probably need to check whether all five contributions are likely to be provided by the people involved in post-deal planning and strategy setting. If there is a gap, it needs to be filled somehow.

Armed with more empowering assumptions; the insight, focus, and acceleration questions; and a desire to seek out low cost (in money but especially time) but high impact solutions, how might activities across the investment lifecycle become more value-adding?

The previous article concluded that current Value Creation approaches may, through their assumptions and methods, cause various dysfunctions which impede value creation. It proposed, by way of a counterbalance and partial cure, ‘value enablement’.

The way that formalised Value Creation has been deployed means that it is often hindering its own objective of systematically growing economic value. This article explains why.

Data on the characteristics and dynamics of small and mid-sized companies can be a bit thin. So, on International Women’s Day, we thought it might be interesting to share analysis from across two Catalysis databases.…

Most of us are familiar with the Pareto Principle, often referred to as the 80:20 rule. The idea, as captured in the graphic below is that a few activities are disproportionately responsible for a large majority of results. The implication, if we can identify the valuable few and take action to deliver them, is that we can achieve substantially better outcomes…