The Private Equity Toolkit. Tamara Sakovska
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proven track record. We like investing in companies with strong brands and solid customer relationships.” Clearly, this acquisition strategy is too broad and would no longer be successful in today's significantly more competitive market.
It is far more effective to narrow your scope and cherry-pick the kind of deals your fund wants to do. What are some of the specific investment themes you have been developing? Is there a differentiated type of deal that your fund excels in? Do you have a good track record in a particular sector?
Ideally, you will focus on just a few investment niches where your firm has a strong competitive advantage, such as unique knowledge gained through existing investments, deep industry expertise or access to sector experts. If you work in a sector team, you might consider exploring specific subsectors within your industry. Once you have a clear point of view about what kind of deals you are targeting, stick to your investment focus and decline everything else coming your way.
By the way, I can tell you from my experience, this is a hard thing to do in practice. If you are intellectually curious or generally suffer from FOMO (“Fear of Missing Out”), it will take some effort to stay disciplined and not veer off your chosen focus.
2. Articulate a concise and memorable message about your mandate
Once you determine what type of deals you are targeting, your next challenge is to create a well-crafted message to share with a wide audience. You should try to convey two things: first, your specific investment focus, and second, why your firm is the best partner for this type of investment. Here is an example of a more pointed description of what a generalist private equity fund might target: “We are looking to invest $50–100 million in businesses operating in the education, healthcare services or specialty chemicals sectors. Our firm has particular expertise in ‘buy and build’ strategies and taking portfolio companies to international markets.” The mandate described here is brief yet quite distinct: it is limited to three specific industry categories and provides information about target deal size and potential value-add from the private equity fund.
If you are a member of a sector team, there is a good chance that you are covering a very large industry, like business services, technology, financial services or consumer. It might be more helpful to carefully think through and communicate to your network the investment niches within your broad sector that you are working on. For instance, rather than discussing your interest in transactions happening, say, in the consumer sector more generally, specify subsegments of interest, such as holiday parks, organic frozen food producers or manufacturers of ethical skincare products. Finally, aim to include specific and memorable details in your message about your fund's credentials in order to stand out.
3. Team up with intermediaries who consistently add value
Your next objective is to inform your existing network about what types of deals you are looking for and to stay top of mind with the people who might help you source opportunistic transactions.
Your fund has a whole ecosystem of advisers, such as bankers, consultants, industry experts or company executives. Not all of them are always helpful, however. Start by assessing your fund's existing network. Who are the top 10% of intermediaries close to your organization who consistently add value, either by introducing relevant transactions, providing differentiated insights, or keeping you up-to-date with industry developments? You might know the answer off the top of your head. Alternatively, your fund might operate a formal tracking system that allows you to evaluate the strengths and contributions of major service providers on a firmwide basis.
If this is not the case and you are interested in compiling a list of the most effective advisers, you can easily do it yourself by reviewing your pipeline in the last 24–36 months to see who made a material contribution to deal sourcing, industry analysis and transaction execution. Whatever method you choose, the final list should contain a manageable number of parties.
The next logical step is to reach out to all advisers on your list and schedule an update call or a meeting with them in the next few weeks. You can talk them through your current investment focus, provide examples of deals that might interest you and remind them of your fund's credentials in the industry sector that you are pursuing.
I typically follow-up with an email too, the point of which is not so much to thank them for their time (I do that too, in case you're wondering), but to provide them with three or four bullet points of information about the deals my team is targeting in the medium term. Effectively, this is an opportunity to broadcast the well-thought-out message you crafted in a previous step to a motivated audience. This summary can also double up as a useful reference for your contacts later, either to remind them what was discussed or even to forward it around to their colleagues and industry contacts. This approach will require an upfront investment of your own time, so it makes sense to contain it to a finite number of parties. I have found that this effort really helps to activate your firm's most valuable connections, leverage others to advocate for your mandate and create a virtuous cycle of new deal ideas, all of which are likely to have far more relevance than a random inbound transaction landing on your desk.
4. Add new relevant connections to your network
They say that success is not about what you know, but whom you know. But maybe it's actually about whom you do not know—at least not yet. Building a search network entails adding new connections that are relevant to your goal. According to Bruner (2004), networks reduce the cost of deal search and afford economies of scale and scope in your search efforts. Furthermore, networks provide a mechanism that helps you spread your message faster, as knowledge inevitably travels from one node to another in a well-functioning network. The nodes in our case are people who may have access to valuable information and potential deals. Metcalfe's Law,2 which states that the value of a network is proportional to the number of working nodes in it, applies well in this instance. Based on this rationale, it makes sense for deal professionals to increase the number of working nodes by enhancing the diversity and breadth of their networks. Bruner (2004) asserts that professional connectivity is a form of social capital that should be cultivated as carefully as talent, financial capital, or physical property.
It sounds very convincing. But what are the concrete steps? You can start with these:
Analyze your firm's existing connections. You have now had an opportunity to assess your firm's network and develop a list of the top 10% most valuable connections. What can you say about the rest of the network? Among the remaining 90%, are there parties who perhaps do not work closely with your fund at present, but potentially could provide you with access to markets that are relevant for your deal search? It makes sense to get closer to these intermediaries and educate them about your current investment focus.
Identify who you would like to meet and begin outreach. Think about the gaps in your firm's network. What are the areas where you should aim to enhance your connectivity? Who can help you find relevant new opportunistic investments, given your current investment focus? Create a list of people and companies that you would like to meet. Determine how many degrees of separation are between you and work on gaining proximity to them. If you are looking for specific ideas for your outreach, it might be helpful to refer to my suggestions in Step 4 of the Thematic Deal Sourcing ICEBERG Roadmap™.
Activate your “weak ties.” Chances are your best friend is unlikely to be able to introduce you to a good investment opportunity. That's because both of you probably