SOLUTIONS
Deliver target returns consistently
While our clients’ requirements vary widely according to their core investment strategies, focus geographies and sectors, they face a common set of business challenges. We have developed solutions for each one.
Sector research and prospecting
Kelp helps clients to identify attractive sectors based on fundamental industry characteristics. By configuring growth, profitability, return and non-financial factors such as general business practices, sector-specific regulatory issues and quality of top talent, clients can perform data-driven analysis and understand how the structural drivers of attractiveness are likely to change over time.
Kelp aids well-informed sector selection by intelligently combining market insights (capital flows, peer strategy and returns), valuation trends (in identified peer sets and in the broader sector) and exit possibilities to provide smart access to years of institutional learning.
For new-age sectors and early-stage investors, Kelp also models target addressable market, headroom for growth, and other bespoke parameters such as consumer churn and buying behaviours. These capabilities enable investors to make informed choices about sector attractiveness.
Deal origination
One of the key drivers of a high-quality deal flow is the institutional capability to identify promising companies ahead of time and build strong deal angles with the founders and CEOs. Kelp enables users to configure well-defined ‘house rules’ that generate a shortlist of high-potential companies, compare deal attractiveness across and within sectors, and perform scenario analysis – all with little or no manual intervention.
Kelp creatively combines alternative sources of data (e.g. digital footprint, consumer feedback) enabling clients to unlock value by triangulating financial and non-financial performance indicators, which helps them glean deeper insights into the fundamental health of target businesses. By helping our clients apply their proprietary approach – their ‘secret sauce’ – smartly on exhaustive data, Kelp helps them to identify and reject misfit deals early, and channel their bandwidth to high-potential opportunities.
Pipeline management
The twin objectives of an effective deal management process are:
- Filtering out the vast majority of misfit deals early
- Early focus on highly qualified deals to improve the chances of success
Kelp helps clients configure and adopt a methodical and comprehensive deal pipeline management framework, starting with preliminary shortlisting through due diligence to closure. The system helps to define a bespoke, best-fit process from start to finish that takes into account clients’ objectives at each stage and their context – early/growth stage investment, deal size, types of deal, sector-focused vs. sector agnostic etc. By combining the investment team’s judgement and hard data, Kelp allows for a comprehensive review of every business.
The system also supports a customised multi-stage IC and voting process, accommodating different asset classes in a firm and or different sector/deal types within asset classes.
And, at every stage of the deal lifecycle, Kelp’s smart data capture options add to institutional learnings to drive enhanced decision-making in the future.
Portfolio management
Kelp supports effective individual company and overall portfolio management by enabling:
- Upfront identification of value drivers
- Alignment of business strategy with value drivers
- Rigorous and comprehensive monitoring through a combination of tailor-made scorecards, MIS and value-bridge analysis
PE/VC firms vary in the degree and nature of their involvement with portfolio companies – including how they work with individual companies within a portfolio. Kelp’s customisable portfolio management suite allows firms to monitor performance at whatever level of granularity suits them, tracking results, strategies and organisational initiatives, summarising focus areas and highlighting calls for action. Kelp has been designed to reduce the time and bandwidth spent on review meetings and sharpen the focus on realising potential so that portfolio company management is digitally linked to the investment decision-making process.
Leadership identification
The quality of the company’s leadership is critical to underwriting businesses: as one of our clients observed, ‘Finding the right CEO partner is a “life or death” decision.’ Kelp enables our clients to identify, cultivate and onboard right-fit leaders by:
- Synthesising and making sense of data-driven, outside-in feedback on leadership and workplace culture. This provides the necessary confidence to back good businesses with strong leadership and organisational potential
- Providing access to all the leadership talent in the target sectors and curated shortlists of potential right-fit leaders, allowing investment/operating partners or talent executives in funds to build relationships with promising leaders
- Supporting the assessment process to conduct high-quality, reliable reference checks
- Institutionalising a rigorous ‘fit’ process by helping to sharply define roles, identifying the right selection panels, smartly combining external feedback with internal reviews, and putting in place decision-making protocols that reduce and/or mitigate hidden biases
Optimising productivity
Individual and collective bandwidth is one of the key factors that influences decisions to focus on specific deals, portfolio companies and sectors and, ultimately, overall performance. Kelp provides a range of tools to review and analyse bandwidth consumption and support strategic adjustments.
Kelp’s productivity tools will help to manage and improve organisational productivity when one or more of the following circumstances apply:
- The firm is operating in an intensely competitive environment where the lead time for response is short, and individual time and task management are critical to firm-level outcomes
- The organisation has a robust network of relationships that is a crucial source of competitive edge.
- Relationships are overly linked to individuals within the team and are vulnerable in the event of exits, especially at senior levels
- Rigor and ‘method’ are required for internal (e.g. effort allocation) and external (e.g. proactive relationship building) prioritisation and where achieving this requires maintaining or improving the team flexibility with minimal system-related overheads.
Kelp’s productivity tools are easily accessible from all the other modules.