Preparing High-Growth Buy and Build Platform for a refinancing

The Swan Partners team were introduced by their PE owner, Inflexion to support the Company to develop a new strategic consolidated model for a newly formed Group.

The Company’s strategy was to develop a “buy-and-build” platform, prepare for a refinancing and position themselves for a mid-range exit prep.

The Swan Partners team worked closely with management to set up forecasts for 9 entities and gave capacity for an additional 20 acquisitions. This enabled forecast acquisitions to be layered on top of the base case and demonstrate the impact on working capital and funding for the enlarged Group.

Our Work:

We performed a detailed design phase, working closely with management to understand the forecast requirements and level of source data available to develop the most beneficial drivers. The revenue drivers were worked through with management, utilising the information available across the entities to agree a uniform approach.

We created a data extraction process, taking the different source data for the 9 entities, including datapoints required for revenue and direct cost inputs.

[The revenue was driven on a chargeable project days * charge out rate which was in line with how the business was driven and all cost and overheads were driven on a simple basis of % of revenue and/or year-on-year growth %.]

The base case in the Model was reflective of the 9 entities already acquired by the Group, however we also built functionality to bolt on known and unknown acquisitions, allowing additional capacity for future entities.

The inclusion of sensitivities allowed management to quickly sensitise specific assumptions relating to revenue on a Group basis. Management could easily bridge the impact of running sensitivities using the variance analysis functionality in the Model.

We built functionality for funding within the Model to allow for new debt facilities and the ability to switch these on and off.

Useful graphical lookups were also built to allow the review of data on an entity and Group basis and review the split of known vs unknown acquisitions.

Effective project management and communication with management ensured a smooth design, build and iteration process.

The model was successfully handed over to management and implemented in the business.

We subsequently, supported management on an additional phase of work involving a commercial review of the Model in advance of distributing to 3rd parties for an upcoming refinancing process.

The Outcome:

The Model was handed over to Management who have successfully raised new debt and acquired an additional 14 acquisitions within an 8-month timeframe. Management are also now using the Model operationally within the Business for ongoing reporting of the expanded Group.