Strategy Consulting Firm Monitors Its PE Clients’ Portfolio Companies

Founded in the early 1900s, this strategy consulting giant, through a network of 25,000+ professionals in 100+ locations around the world, advises some of the most influential companies across diverse geographies and a range of industries and lends its expertise in functions that range from corporate restructuring to private equity (PE) consulting.

The private equity consulting practise of the firm employs more than 2,500 consultants and industry leaders to help some of the world’s most valuable private equity firms track their portfolio companies and provide the right insights and advice for making sound decisions across the investment lifecycle.

The firm’s twenty PE clients are some of the world’s largest by capital raised and have cumulatively invested in 1,800+ companies spread across 150 countries. The firm wanted to monitor the digital footprint of these portfolio companies to identify signals that could trigger an opportunity to pitch for their strategy and management consulting services. The services include lending expertise in the areas of new market entry, go-to-market strategy, partner research, product pre-launch evaluation, among others.

These opportunities are identified on the basis of signals from these portfolio companies that could indicate an impending merger or acquisition, IPO announcement, stake buy or sale, a new partnership or alliance, or plans for business expansion.

These updates were to be consolidated in an intelligence newsletter report and sent to the regional business development and account management teams on a daily basis.

• A major part of the challenge was the regular monitoring of approximately 1,800 portfolio companies to explore new business opportunities based on their strategic business decisions. The firm was particularly interested in leveraging specific types of updates that could signal a requirement for new consulting expertise.
• Furthermore, the company didn’t want to rely solely on publicly available web news sources since several signals of strategic importance that are posted on the company websites are often missed out in media coverage.
• The news updates needed to be categorised and sorted by geography and shared with their respective regional business development teams.

Sifting through the sheer volume of updates manually was a herculean task and the firm was on the lookout for an automated market intelligence solution to automate the process of aggregating, structuring and delivering intelligence reports to the business development and account management teams.

Each private equity account was to have its own dedicated intelligence report to include signals categorised by region and business topic, whilst conforming to the firm’s editorial guidelines.

Another significant challenge was ensuring the accuracy and relevance of the gathered intelligence. With the rapid pace of change in various industries, the firm needed to implement a robust verification system to cross-reference information from multiple sources. This system would need to be adaptable to different sectors, capable of recognizing industry-specific jargon, and able to flag potential discrepancies or conflicting information for human review, thereby maintaining the integrity of the intelligence reports.

Setting up a comprehensive monitoring

Contify configured a comprehensive monitoring system to track each of the 1,800 portfolio companies for relevant strategic updates beyond those covered by media outlets through news websites and press releases to include intelligence from company websites, social media handles, subscription databases, and regulatory portals like the SEC.

Contify also leveraged SmartTranslate to include updates from hundreds of non-English sources for a more holistic picture of the market landscape.

Identifying avenues for growth

Contify worked with the consulting firm to identify the specific intelligence signals that could trigger an opportunity to pitch its services and tag each of these updates with their associated business opportunity:

• Business expansion

  Market entry strategies.

• Partnerships and alliances

  Partner identification and due diligence.

• Merger and acquisition

  Capital restructuring and debt refinancing.

• Negative news

  Brand monitoring and crisis management.

• New offerings

  Product go-to-market strategies and sales plays.

• Operational challenges

  Management and operational strategy consulting.

These signals were further categorized according to their stage — planning stage, execution stage, agreement stage, and completion stage.

Finalizing the report structure

The Contify team worked closely with the firm to iterate on and finalize a structure that resonated with the regional business development teams with respect to the business opportunities, geographic classification, and as well as editorial guidelines.

Learn more about Contify

The strategy consulting firm evaluated Contify through a three-month pilot programme to track the portfolio companies of five of its private equity clients. Within the first six months of signing up, the firm deployed Contify’s intelligence reports to track the portfolio companies of all 20 of it’s PE accounts.

By delivering curated, structured intelligence whilst ensuring comprehensive coverage, Contify helped the firm save on daily manual research efforts by 30%.

With Contify, the firm’s business development teams are able to jump at the right opportunity at the right time and close potential deals, faster.