Our team have been directors of:
Value creation
Sustainable value creation requires deep and broad experience in the
eco-systems (internal and external) that influence and constrain directors.
Creating value is…
What’s affecting your eco-system?
Your ownership structure
- General partners in an LP & LLPs
- Companies limited by guarantee
- Companies limited by shares
- PLCs (non-listed)
- PLCs (Listed)
- Owner managed businesses
- Employee-owned businesses
- Wholly owned subsidiaries
- B Corps
- Public interest entities
- Trusts
- Community Interest Organisations
- Universities
- Charities
The expectations of your funders?
We know the expectations of funders because globally we have been directors of/advisors to:
- Venture Capital/Family offices
- Private Equity Funds (with fixed and with permanent capital)
- Special Purpose vehicles
- Asset Backed Lenders
- Central banks
- Bodies funded directly and indirectly by government funding
- Bodies funded by trusts and charitable giving
The outlook for your sector?
We follow the work of broad spectrum futurist such as Amy Webb and her team at the Futures Institute at NYU and sector specific futurists in the sectors where we have specific experience including:
- Financial services
- Biopharmaceuticals
- Information technology
- Education and training
- Media
- Oil & Gas and renewable energies
- FMCG (B2C businesses)
- Transportation & Logistics
- Support services (B2B businesses)
We encourage colleagues and clients to follow futurists with divergent views.
We understand how the regulatory environment and real-world business issues impact valuation.
How we do this in practice
Our ability to know “What’s really going on”, whether we are advising on a disposal or a purchase, allows us to design processes tailored to ensure success for the particular circumstances of a client because no two clients have the same requirements. In addition to the broad sectoral expertise of our Affiliates, Mary Campbell is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority to carry out regulated work and does so through her consultancy arrangements with DC Dwek Corporate Finance. Have a look at the Project Island case study and let Andy tell you what he thought of our value add when we advised him on a disposal.
The directors of a global defence related business were approaching retirement and wanted to receive maximum value for their shares.
Challenges
- In many sectors, particularly the highly regulated ones, the ownership of the business matters and can impact the value of the business. Selling the business before its sophisticated customers/regulators/competitors discovering that it’s ownership might change is vital, because markets hate uncertainty.
- In a sales process, trade buyers tend to offer ‘knock-out’ headline bids because the business is usually worth more to trade buyers than to financial buyers. However, high headline prices are often followed by due diligence price reductions and significant price retentions on completion. Anticipating the likely avenues for price reductions and retentions, before allowing potential purchaser to look at a business, is a vital step in mitigating the risk of “price-chipping”.
- Potential purchasers and advisers can afford to fail, because there is always another deal to be done, it’s the business owners who risk being left with a damaged business, so managing expectations and protecting the underlying business are crucial steps in the process.
- The value is created in designing a process that ensures that a top multiple of earnings is paid out in cash in full.
Processing
- Prior to approaching any potential purchaser, we prepare a traffic light assessment that brings together the client’s knowledge of the market opportunity, our knowledge of the valuation creation opportunities being sought globally in that sector and our expertise is getting deals done that realise the values expected. This traffic light assessment is fully debated with the internal and external due diligence and transaction support teams so that everyone can challenge robustly the factors behind the “go, no-go” assessments being made on each potential purchaser.
- A sales process is tailored to ensure absolute adherence to the fundamental requirements of the sellers, which can include absolute confidentiality in the due diligence processes.
- Our ability to anticipate the completion requirement of different potential purchasers such as the impact of the NASDAQ reporting requirements on the completion statements (and the implications for the payment of sums retained for payment post completion) allows us to design a process that protects the sellers from these risks.
- Our experience helps us manage expectations with timely messaging, and our effective, respectful control of all professionals (whether in the buyers or the sellers’ teams) limits transaction costs.
”After meeting Mary Campbell, we were convinced not only of her sensitivity and that of the other advisors who would be appointed during the process, but we were certain of her ability to quickly grasp our business’s capabilities, its ethics, its diverse market sectors. The processes she designed gave us complete certainty that we would be guide us as first-time sellers through the process. They fully understood the requirements of the director/shareholders need to be discreet and highly sympathetic to our individual requirements.
We were clear what would be acceptable, what might be acceptable and what would be no-go requests. We finished the process with the top-end expectations of the cash in our personal bank accounts and we were paid out every cent of the 10% retentions when the two-year retention period was over. We retired from the business we had started with our global personal reputations intact and the purchaser unable to find fault in our business.
AndyProject Island
