Building a pan European origination process from nothing

The problem

A fourteen person team cannot cover a continent by reading the market the way a large institution does. There are not enough hours. Either you narrow the geography, which removes most of the opportunity, or you find a way to watch more markets than you can personally read.

What I did

I recruited the entire team and built the processes the business ran on: origination, selection, asset management and divestiture. The part that mattered most was the market tracking process.

The principle was simple and it is the one I still work to. Separate the watching from the judging. Watching is repetitive, high volume and can be systematised. Judging is the part that needs an experienced person, and it should only be spent on things that have already passed a filter.

Once that separation existed, a small team could hold a genuinely pan European view, because the volume of what needed reading properly had been cut down to what the team could actually read.

What changed

The business made around fifteen investments across numerous asset classes in four countries, with fifteen acquisitions and nine divestitures, and no capital loss on the investments it sold.

Net performance across the platform was an internal rate of return of 11.0 per cent on debt and 15.3 per cent on equity, at multiples on invested capital of 1.29 and 1.63 times respectively, for a total of 13.5 per cent and 1.51 times.

Why this is relevant to your business

This is the same structure as a modern lead generation or research system, built before the tools existed to do it well.

Define what you are looking for precisely. Watch far more of the market than you could read. Filter hard. Put a short, high quality list in front of the person whose judgement you are paying for. The tools have improved enormously. The process has not changed.