Читать книгу The Private Equity Toolkit - Tamara Sakovska - Страница 26

Let's take an honest look at where you are at the moment. Do you think your firm has strong deal sourcing capabilities? To distinguish good luck from a solid origination process, it might be helpful to think through and answer the following questions.

 Does your fund set tightly defined investment goals for the next 12–18 months? Does your firm have a well-articulated sourcing strategy?

 Does your firm pursue a research-driven thematic deal sourcing approach? Are there specific investment theses that you are developing in your area of focus?

 How many proprietary deals has your firm sourced and what origination strategies were most successful?

 Does your firm capture detailed data on the deal pipeline? Are you able to analyze past and current deal flow with basic pipeline key performance indicators (“KPIs”)?

 Do you know what proportion of deals your firm has seen that are relevant to your area of focus? How many deals has your firm missed? Of those deals that were missed, how were they sourced? Do you have access to the same deal source?

 If your fund saw the deal and rejected it, is there anything in the investment thesis that you failed to detect that other firms were able to spot?

 Do you maintain a list of potential deal targets? Do you use a tech-enabled solution that allows you to keep track of them easily? Do you reach out to them consistently and follow up? Do you keep in touch with companies that currently appear to have no interest in selling?

 Do you record key takeaways from meetings and calls that various members of your team have had with a potential deal target over the years? Is this information stored centrally and easy to access?

 Does your firm have a good system of keeping track and systematizing firmwide relationships, such as with banks, consultants, industry experts and other professional intermediaries? Are you able to rank your relationships based on the value they provide to your firm?

These questions, no doubt, represent a degree of self-reflec-tion and discipline that can seem hard to reach. If your firm does not follow most of these processes, do not worry. These procedures are fairly straightforward to establish and, once in place, they will produce substantial benefits. If your firm already operates in a fairly organized way, then you are already ahead of the game and any incremental deal sourcing efforts should result in an even greater tangible payoff.