Pattern recognition in Private Equity

If you do the same thing almost forty times, you start to see patterns emerge.

It doesn’t matter if it's catching the same bus, running the same loop or heaven forbid, eating at the same restaurant.

For the curious mind, repetition breeds realisation.

Hmm. 

The 7am bus driver is always late and never smiles.

I run faster on a Monday than a Friday.

The weekend wine waiter really knows his stuff; his bin-ends are the stuff of dreams. 

So too with forty assignments for Private Equity-owned businesses. We started to see patterns that were driven more by the maturity of the business than the sector or industry. 

Patterns in the introduction: I've been working with the CEO to see if we can squeeze more juice out of our marketing investment and I wonder if you can help.

Patterns in the briefing: We've got a handle on pretty much everything round the boardroom table. We've restructured our supply chain, sorted our IT and tech stack, rebooted our sales teams and the new People officer is working out really well. We just don’t really know where to start with our marketing. Do we need to hire, fire or promote a CMO, fire all our agencies, or something else? 

Patterns in discovery: No one can agree on the marketing objective for your business. No one can tell me if you are spending too much or too little on marketing. No one can agree if your team/agencies/results are brilliant or useless. No one can explain to me why you are sending so much money to Google, month after month. 

Sound familiar?

After about a dozen such circuits, we built our marketing diagnostics tool.

It takes twenty-seven different, auditable pieces of data around a business across each of the three genres of marketing (Product Marketing, Brand Marketing and Digital Marketing) and rolls them up into an overall Growth Marketing score. This shows areas of excellence and improvement across any business. It shows what you need to focus on, and what you need to leave well alone. 

We can do this in around a day and, if you are nice to us, we'll even do it without charge for you. 

(Pretty soon we won't even have to ask your permission to do the work. Our AI version of the marketing diagnostic tool will do it all for us) 

Faced with such a simple, comprehensive visual read-out on a business, life becomes so much simpler.

We can have sensible, data-driven, adult conversations about where you (or we?) need to focus.

We can agree which of our practice leaders you should meet. 

Do you wonder if you are targeting the most promising audience?  And are you doing it with the right insight? If so, Julian Delamain is your man. 

Perhaps you need a conversation about channels and getting your product into the right place at the right price? Will Harris can help there. 

If the diagnosis confirms your hunch that your brand is more of a liability than an asset, then you should meet our practice lead Sonja Healy.

If your marketing organisation and operation are not firing as they should be, Maya Bhose can provide expertise and advice.

And finally, if your blocker is around AI or technology, then our CTO and practice lead Tobi Ajala is the answer. 

We've built these practice leads as levers for value creation in the Private Equity world. They encompass the full gamut of value creation as it relates to brand and marketing, and when those levers are fully engaged, there is no stopping your business growth.

After almost forty times round this track, we can guarantee it.