Читать книгу The Private Equity Toolkit - Tamara Sakovska - Страница 29

Identifying, developing and monetizing an investment theme is a valuable skill. Thematic deal sourcing allows you to build an extensive knowledge base in a sector of your choice, develop differentiated insights and gain an information advantage over your competitors. Gaining deep industry knowledge helps to improve the quality of your investment decisions and provides you with a better understanding of deal targets operating in that industry. Your investment committee will have more confidence to move quickly in the competitive process if they know that you and your team have become experts on the subject, and your investment thesis is well thought out and credible because you have spent considerable time researching the industry.

Your industry expertise allows you to stand out from the crowd in a busy private equity marketplace. Deep sector research inevitably results in generating extensive (and potentially not widely known) information about key players in that market, and these companies might become interesting deal targets for proprietary transactions. Your sector knowledge will enable you to empathize with management teams on key industry issues and position yourself as a value-added partner of choice to them. Professional advisers working on deals in the sector that you know well will appreciate the fact that they do not have to spend time educating you about the industry and will be enthusiastic about engaging with you on potential transactions.

It sounds like there are only positives in a thematic deal sourcing process, right? Unfortunately, not. It is a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. It requires such an overwhelming effort on your part that it might be very tempting to return to your day-to-day reactive activities and abandon your goal of becoming an industry expert altogether. I have certainly experienced this feeling on more than one occasion, especially when working on sectors that I was less excited about. I felt like I certainly had enough to fill my days without taking a “deep dive” into a new sector.

What can make thematic deal sourcing less daunting? What I have found is that this task seems far less intimidating when thematic research is broken down into small, digestible pieces that form a checklist-like framework. It is much easier to check small items off your list than deal with one mammoth chore. Since I could not find such a detailed checklist aimed at a thematic private equity deal sourcing process anywhere, I put together this 7-step thematic deal sourcing framework myself. Here it goes.