TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Hutton Henry (Beyond M&A): You're looking at an amazing company, the market is great, the growth opportunity is phenomenal, but the product not so great, meaning that if we grow the business, you're to have to increase the headcount by 300%. What do we do? Hi, it's Hutton here. I'm the managing partner, founder of Beyond &A. We're the merger synchronization builders and I'm doing these merge discussions or talks to talk about the five stages of our process, but more importantly, your process and how do you diligence, integrate and create more value within the businesses that you've purchased or invested in. Today, I'm focused on the last stage, evolve, of our process. That's the lovely word that's used out there, value creation. But I'd like to use a real scenario where things could look a bit difficult from the beginning, but with some creative thinking between us, the investors and the platform, we came around with a rather good idea. And it's a joint thing. And I think that's a really important aspect, actually. So I'll just run through the situation again in a more coherent way. So effectively, it's about five, six years ago, a business was in a very good market. And that's the thing I get excited about when we look at them. And the first thing I look at is the market. And what we could also see is what the advisor had stated about growth and the investor had bought into the growth story. So we've got a really good reason to invest invest into this business. But when we had look at the actual business itself, we could find some issues with the fact that this whole business, which had digitised itself, had a tonne of workarounds. And so if we were simply going to move from stage A to stage B in terms of growth, we'd worked out that there was a 300 % increase on headcount. And regardless of the size of any business, that's just unacceptable isn't it? And the reason for that was a number of workarounds, poor sort of experience and really not fitting the customer journey anymore. So the obvious thing to do here is to look at it from a product perspective and really help the business understand how they can redesign what they're doing in a way that can... can absolutely turn things around. And so effectively we had to help the CXOs look at this from a new perspective, design a new way of working and that would obviously be around the customer journey and the organisation model and Tom if you like. But the key thing was drilling down to the heart of the business, which is the technology and helping them redesign that based on what the business needed. took some time and we went through some typical things there really because we had to grow the engineering team, we had to work out how to improve project management, it had just been invested in by a private equity, so to increase governance as well and I do very much recall the time when the CTO had been around for 10 years and once this deal had gone through he was really debating whether he should stay on because the pace of work and the challenge was so challenging for him personally. I'm super happy to say that he's still in that job today. They rebuilt a platform and what that really did was bring all the different units of the business back together again because they'd been quite isolated working their ivory towers. So from there we helped them redesign everything, pulling the right people, so you know helping with interviewing, bringing the right leaders in on the tech function and even sort of comparing an external function because a new chairperson had come in and they were going to use an external consultancy and we could see that there was very good capability within the team but they were going to need some help if they going to grow their own team. So it was a good AI story as well way before AI became mainstream and effectively that company has made the growth trajectory of that time anyway. I haven't checked it recently but I think that's a an extraordinary where operations efficiency and excellence coming together, driving people hearts and minds through tech and new ways of working. So that's the E stage of our process, EVOLVE. Others call it Valley Creation and that's all good. So yeah, see you on the next one.