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…

Imagine the following scenario. As chief executive of a growth company, you have been working for months preparing a fund-raising process or sale to private equity. During the beauty parade of investors, almost all went out of their way to express…

Half the second founder-entrepreneurs we get to interview seem to start the description of their background by explaining that they didn’t thrive at school, were focused instead on sport or their social life, and so started work in mundane or improbable jobs. Recent examples of this include…

One way to define what Catalysis does with investors and companies is that we (i) help directors create executable strategies and then, (ii), make sure that the managerial and organisational underpinnings of strategy execution are in place. On the first point, we don’t identify the ‘what’ of strategy…

You’re probably not great at hiring great talent despite being thoughtful, experienced and keen on improvement (these being characteristics of the people who seem to gravitate towards working with Catalysis). I’m pretty confident in stating that because (a) hiring people is almost certainly…

Because 2020 let us work with some investor friends more than others, I thought it might be helpful to briefly summarise the ways in which the Catalysis team has been honing its ability to provide you with what we believe has become the most agile and insightful source of support for mid-market investors around management…

You are, of course, very familiar with financial balance sheets and how they relate to on-going activities (think P&L) and concrete outcomes (cash). Likewise, you know about the category of intangibles, i.e. assets you cannot touch, see or count easily such as software…

A few years ago, there was a major study carried out by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) at Aston University which looked at the performance over time of 48,000 high growth firms (HGFs) in the UK. HGFs are defined by the OECD as companies ‘with average annualised growth…

Over the years, the Catalysis team has observed that the two most frequent issues we need to help our investor clients identify and deal with are:

1. At company level, misalignment between strategic ambitions and the capability of teams and organisations to…

It is not surprising, that with so much going on in the news at the moment, we tend to stay focused on coping with the short term disruptions we are faced with: a second wave of Covid, the messy economic environment and the unpredictable implications of Brexit…

So, we got through the initial lockdown period, hopefully relaxed a bit over the summer and it’s now back to school - and back to investing. The deal pipelines of Catalysis clients and the CF advisers appear busy again which is encouraging. But to state the obvious, there are more uncertainties…