At the heart of the Private Equity (PE) process is the investment thesis or “equity story”. This is how the portfolio company will deliver the value growth that investors expect. It is what you, the portfolio company management team, must deliver on.

Achieving that kind of hard and fast growth means transforming your business. You will need to be a thoroughly effective leadership team, seeking to adopt best practice across every area of your business. The transformation of your business will often involve a process of scaling up across the board. The challenge is to make sure the interests of the stakeholders – management, company and investor – stay aligned throughout the process.

How BDO can help you grow

BDO’s PE team will generate the ideas and insights to help you find the right way forward for your business.

Our expertise comes from the hands-on experience of taking hundreds of businesses through Private Equity. We are results-driven and help our clients achieve their goals. We work across the full range of audit, tax and business advisory services. We will work with you to ensure that every area of your business is geared towards successfully delivering on the equity story.

Below are some of the areas where we can provide the advice and ideas that will help your company become a successful PE-backed business.

Performance and Growth

We will help you refine your business strategy to drive top line growth and improve margins. We can help you define your investment priorities and ensure that whether you are investing in acquisitions or people or technology, that investment is effectively supporting accelerated growth.

Financial Management and funding

The most effective business leaders know how to sweat every asset and every pound. We will work with you to improve cash flow. We will also help you improve the efficiency of your tax and financial structures. These improvements will make it easier to manage your bank and other funders and fund acquisitions. These are also areas where we can provide specific advice and practical support.

Operational Improvement

Taking some time to properly investigate what positive impact can be achieved through making operational improvements is well worthwhile. Our experience is that most companies can drive greater growth, higher margin, better cash conversion and reduce risks when they set their minds to it. The question is whether the returns are worth the investment. We will help you benchmark your operational effectiveness, devise pragmatic, down-to-earth, plans that can be delivered within your time frame and advise on, or help deliver, implementation of any changes that are decided.

Governance and leadership

We will advise you on the appropriate and most effective governance structures. The aim must be to maintain alignment around the business strategy and ensure that your management team are able to deliver. We often find that the biggest impact comes from addressing any gaps in the management team. This can mean bringing in additional expertise in the form of Non-Executive Directors or adding PE experience to the management team.

Risk, management and financial reporting

PE investors will demand high levels of management and financial reporting. Are your systems up to the job? We can help improve your reporting system. We will also advise on regulatory compliance as new requirements become relevant. Our aim is to ensure that you are minimising risks by putting in place the right reporting and compliance structures.
 

Strategy

Your strategy is the foundation that all growth is based on. It should help you answer some of the following questions;

• What M&A activity should you pursue?
• Where will new revenues come from?
• What is your international strategy?
• Who is going to buy your business when it comes to realising the gains you have created?

If your strategy isn’t doing that, we can provide advice on developing it. We can also work with you to secure stakeholder alignment around delivering it.