1 min read
The Easy Part and the Hard Part of a PE Acquisition
Last year a private equity firm in the Southern US acquired a legacy company as an add-on to their manufacturing portfolio.
That was the easy part. That’s a weekly headline.
Hard part:
Taking everything only the owner knows and making that a workflow.
Accurately predict material costs and labor costs to systematically quote pricing instead of guessing.
Freeing up the COO’s time to make strategical decisions instead of spending half his day exporting spreadsheets from QuickBooks to Excel.
Solution: Apply data principles to each part of the business.
Import QB information to a data warehouse through an automated pipeline.
Run analytics and forecasting using programming languages
Connect results to Excel/Power BI.
Go another step and apply some machine learning, or even AI.
Go another step and plug-and-play this infrastructure into the rest of the portfolio group, now you have cross-platform reporting and a unified view of all the companies in the group at once.
Dealing with something similar?
I work with SMBs and PE-backed companies on exactly these problems — financial operations, reporting infrastructure, and analytics built on the systems you already have.