May 4, 2023

Search Fund Primer: Your Guide to Launching a Successful Search Fund

As the incredible success of private equity over the past couple of decades has made clear to many aspiring company owners and investors, if you can find and acquire a decent company, it’s possible to earn great returns. This has fueled a new class of individuals seeking to launch their own search funds. But how to start a search fund that wins at the acquisition game? 

This guide to starting a successful search fund answers the questions: What is a search fund? And, How can I start a successful search fund?

Let’s explore.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Entrepreneurial Studies explains search funds this way: “The model offers relatively inexperienced professionals with limited capital resources a quick path to managing a company in which they have a meaningful ownership position.”

Inexperienced professionals? Limited capital resources? It doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success.

But it can be.

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March 31, 2021

4 Winning Strategies to Add Value to Portfolio Companies

“For private equity funds, the clock starts ticking the second you sign, the second you own your new portfolio company. So the Holy Grail is: how do you add superior value?” That’s how InterimExecs CEO Robert Jordan helped kick off a recent panel about adding value to portfolio companies. Sponsored by InterimExecs and hosted by Private Equity Career News publisher David Toll and John McNulty’s Private Equity Professional, panel experts shared best practices for value creation.

On the panel were Jordan, Micah Dawson, vice president of Portfolio Support at Trivest Partners; Pericles Mazarakis, managing partner of TriSpan; and Mike Zawalski, an InterimExecs RED Team member who serves in executive chairman roles with PE-backed portfolio companies.

Here, we round up the top insights from the panelists, everything from the importance of monthly operation reports to establishing trust with the business owner and investing in human capital.

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November 6, 2020

Private Equity Looks to Operational Leadership in Hyper Competitive Markets

Private equity funds are entering a new phase that requires new tactics to be successful against many alternative sources of funds. With a vast reservoir of dry powder – $1.5 trillion waiting to be deployed – PE funds seeking the whip hand will build and pivot while the economy is reinventing and reviving in 2021 and 2022. But what worked in the past won’t work in the future. Moving forward, adding value will require more attention to management fit for the purpose of rapidly transforming portfolio companies.

“Every good private equity professional will tell you that the most important factor behind a successful investment is the management team,” said Eric Jones, a partner and member of the corporate and private equity groups at Detroit law firm Honigman LLP. Jones was a speaker at the University of Michigan Private Equity Conference held virtually in September 2020 and attended by InterimExecs. “You can have even market share, but without a very strong management team, it’s not going to be sustained. The business isn’t going to grow and the investment piece isn’t going to be realized,” he said.

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May 29, 2020

How Company Owners Can Still Win in the Current M&A Market

The COVID-19 pandemic and global economic lockdown has seen merger and acquisition (M&A) activity plummet. From $3.9 trillion in global takeovers in 2019, announced deals plunged 51% in the first quarter in the US according to Refinitiv. Uncertainties in the business and capital markets have led to buyers delaying or cutting back on their acquisition plans. But with crisis comes opportunity. Those able to navigate the new risk landscape may find compelling deals on the other side of the pandemic. Now more than ever, expert help with strategic planning, modelling out “what if” scenarios when the world frees up from lockdown, and preparing better for post-acquisition merger integration can help owners succeed in acquiring or being acquired.

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February 5, 2020

A 5 Year Odyssey to Bring Better Healthcare to Sub Saharan Africa

It might be a challenge to develop a new medical facility in the United States. But it’s nothing compared to developing one in sub Saharan Africa.

That’s what Dr. Rodney Armstead learned on his 5-year quest to open the first specialty practice and minimally invasive surgery center in Accra, the capital city of Ghana.

LuccaHealth Medical Specialty Center has two campuses in Accra. One opened in November 2019 and the other in February 2020. Together, they will offer 11 specialties and minimally invasive (laparoscopic) same day surgery when LuccaHealth is fully operational at the end of 2021:

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December 7, 2018

Interim Executives Help Grow Private Equity Portfolio Companies

It’s not uncommon for private equity portfolio companies to double or even triple growth thanks to merger or acquisition. Albeit positive, rapid growth brings new operational challenges that can stop the upward momentum in its tracks. Interim executives bring the expertise needed to enable growth on a massive scale.

“Sometimes a business will start with $40 million in sales, and through acquisition will be two or three times that size. Often that creates an environment where you need to add to the management team, whether that be the CFO or the CEO,” said Forest Wester, a Partner at Trivest Partners that leverages interim executives to enable growth.

Private equity funds use interim executives in a variety of scenarios. However, these scenarios are typically problems that need to be solved such as the abrupt departure of a CEO.

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January 26, 2018

Private Equity Fund In Hot Water Deploys Interim Team

What do you do when your fund does a great job buying 5 divisions of a big publishing company spinning off assets, only to find one of the divisions starts going sideways?

First, you give the division some time to right the ship on their own.

Unfortunately, for one multi-billion dollar private equity fund, this strategy didn’t work… and the fund gave the CEO four years to get it right.

That’s a lot of patience.

Eventually, it came time to make a change, which the managing partner was dreading.

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December 6, 2017

PE Fund Managers: Take a Lesson from Falconhead’s IMG History

Robert Jordan | CEO, InterimExecs

The overriding, ever present recurring theme of PE fund managers is dealflow. What keeps a PE fund manager up at night? Dealflow. What gets a them up in the morning? More deals. What drives them to stay connected and answer the phone while on vacation? That would be more deals.

And dealflow’s brother is price. As dealflow becomes more pressured and harder to come by, prices of companies go up. And seemingly everything gets shopped since fund after fund are grabbing for the same opportunities.

Proprietary access to deals is the holy grail. Into this challenge, how does a professional investor win, if you can’t even get to the start line?

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June 26, 2017

The Six Times PE Funds Use Interim Executives

Many private equity funds hear the words “interim executive” and think the only application is turnaround or short-term fill-in. But for PE funds seeking a great return, they look to interims for their unique abilities to build and transform companies.

Here are six major use cases for interim executives in PE-owned portfolio companies:

Interim Executives in Diligence
Most funds hope to spread their wings – work beyond industries where they’ve already had success, by looking at new industries where acquisitions may cost less and produce higher returns. The further afield they go, the more they need expert leadership removed from prior operating teams.

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June 6, 2017

Selling in a Few Years? Start Packaging Your Company Now

According to a Harvard Business Review report, the failure rate for mergers and acquisitions sits between 70 and 90%. Even before the deal closes, it’s not uncommon for deals to unravel.

If the odds can be overwhelmingly negative, what can you do to increase your chance of success if you are looking to sell your business?

Prepare.

Don’t wait for the M&A process to begin to get your team in gear – that’s a sure fire way to fail.

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