Issues and solutions
Partnership with Private Equity
Investing has become more complex over recent decades and the pressures on investors to originate, find new ways to add value, and play an ever wider role, have grown. In that context, Catalysis seeks ways to make life easier for our investor clients beyond working on target/investee issues.
The main areas where we help are:
Building investor non-financial skills
Investors are being asked to play a wider role in boards and companies than was the case, say, two decades ago. However, apart from learning (often sporadically) from colleagues and acting as observer on boards, there is often precious little support to help develop investor skills in non-financial areas.
We help by delivering short interactive training sessions (complimentary), bespoke training (paid) and providing team and organisational issues handbooks.
Supporting investee portfolio events
We offer content and/or facilitation for events bringing together investee stakeholders in various combinations: e.g. CEOs, FDs, Chairs. Those tend to be bespoke in nature but tend to fall into two main categories:
Content driven sessions on the ‘vital few’ growth interventions or specific topics
Facilitated sessions between groups of peers or across wider stakeholders.
Projects supporting the development of PE houses
Most of our work is focused on investee companies and targets. However, private equity houses are themselves growth companies with their own team and organisational needs.
Over the years we have been asked to carry out more than 30 projects inside PE houses. Those have fallen into two main categories:
Improving PE team effectiveness
Building value creation capability.
Being helpful on pipeline
Investors are naturally hungry to find new opportunities to deploy capital into. Within the limits of strict respect for NDAs and a more general commitment to not embarrass or undermine current or former clients we can apply filters (sector, geography, size, vintage) to our back catalogue of 100s of previous projects to see where there might be opportunities for incumbent investors to speak with potential secondary buyers.
Explore our insights on partnerships with Private Equity
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Why private equity investors are building ‘value machines’ - whether they know it or not
…. 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.
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Who should lead value enablement?
…. 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.
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How might activities across the deal cycle evolve to become more value-adding?
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?
