How We Assist Investment Firms
The Market-Focused problem solving and opportunity identification concepts used by The MFL Group are powerful and transformational in their ability to create and capture value. They have helped many businesses rapidly and sustainably improve their performance from both a top- and bottom-line perspective. These concepts, unfortunately, are generally not intuitively obvious or easy to apply, especially when a management team is facing the challenge of multiple priorities or major distractions from their core business. However, our real world experience has demonstrated that organizations are most change-ready during a significant transition in ownership, technology or market conditions.
Investment firms often find one or more of their portfolio companies facing a transition period which both creates challenge and the opportunity to use an improved Market-Focus to strengthen the business. MFL can provide significant value-added at this point for investment firms and their portfolio companies.
Our role in these situations is to work directly with the management of the portfolio business. This permits the leaders of the investment firm to play a more productive, value-added role as a Board member, while at the same time significantly reducing the risk and improving the likelihood of success of their portfolio company. In addition, our work with several portfolio companies creates a powerful way to identify synergies and linkages between portfolio companies because of the common language and Market-Focused mindset.
MFL assists investment firms in four different ways:
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Resolve significant issues and opportunities identified at the Board level that cannot be readily attacked and resolved with the internal resources available to a portfolio company or the investment firm. Situations where there is an opportunity for more effective pricing strategy, tactics and process, distribution channel redesign, product development enhancement, sales productivity improvement, or human resource leadership redirection can be quickly and effectively resolved by MFL project teams. Once again, our disciplined and practical experience-based approaches can help portfolio businesses achieve quick and high-impact improvements in top-line and bottom-line performance.
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Coach key management team members in portfolio companies. An investment firm's value-added on the Board is often limited when it comes to coaching management team members of portfolio companies. This limitation can be caused by the natural hierarchical role of a Board member and can be exacerbated by a lack of one-on-one time. Typically, investment firm representatives' time with portfolio company managers is focused on operating and financial issues, leaving little time for coaching in strategy and organization development. Yet, this type of coaching can be a powerful way to reduce risk and improve the likelihood of success for portfolio businesses.
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Assist in the initial business plan development with specific focus on marketing strategies. Our real world experience in both New Economy and Old Economy businesses combined with a disciplined and structured approach to the development of Value Propositions and Value Delivery Systems permits newly acquired businesses to move quickly into an implementation mode where they can leverage their strengths and ensure that they meet pro forma financial projections.
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Assist in due diligence for potential investments. We do this by leveraging our extensive line management and consulting experience to rapidly understand the market and competitive environment and assess the effectiveness of the existing Value Propositions and Value Delivery Systems. We use this insight to identify the location and size of untapped profit opportunities and areas of significant market risk. We accomplish this with a focused and disciplined approach to performing due diligence which permits significant insight to be gained in a short time and a relatively unobtrusive manner.
