As the original UK partnership investor, Growth Capital Partners (‘GCP’) is known for providing ambitious entrepreneurs with equity capital for growth, strategic support for accelerated scaling, and shareholder liquidity. Headquartered in London and founded more than 25 years ago, GCP has made nearly 50 partnership investments to date.
GCP hired Michael Gray as its Origination Director five years ago to help support and systemize GCP’s transition from a generalist investor to a more thematic and strategic approach across two core sectors. “When I joined GCP we were well known for our investment style but less so for our demonstrable sector experience,” says Michael. “My job is to lead and enhance our early engagement activity with prospective companies in advance of any potential fund raise.”
Once an attractive sub-sector has been identified, scouring company websites, reviewing industry-specific events lists, and sourcing relevant award nominees to identify potentially relevant businesses takes a considerable amount of time. After targets that match the team’s thesis criteria have been determined, next steps traditionally involve searching for contact data and manually entering information into the firm’s CRM. This all needs to be done before any outreach can take place.
“Our scarcest commodity is time, and as a team of one, company research, identification, and information gathering requires hours that I really don’t have,” explained Michael. “The targeted outreach and refined messaging pre-meeting is where I want to focus. Unless we hired a number of additional people on the team, we needed a tool to effectively leverage my time and enable the investment team to be more effective with theirs.”
After researching several vendors, Michael chose Sourcescrub thanks to its intuitive user experience, data quality, and AI-driven capabilities. Sourcescrub links each of the millions of private companies in its database to the sources where information about them is found. This AI-powered approach creates an interconnected web of insight that makes it easy to infer these companies’ growth intent, identify their competitors, and map entire categories.
“I have been pleasantly surprised with the intuitive nature of Sourcescrub and the relatively limited investment criteria required to generate an accurate and relevant sub-sector list,” shares Michael. “We generally have a small number of attractive, niche targets that I have already identified, and the tool enables us to build an extended list of equally attractive businesses with a few clicks and minor search refinements. In short order, I can get to an extensive list of companies with key contacts identified, including their email addresses.”
Once Michael identifies a company that he’s interested in, all of the information about the business can be passed directly to GCP’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Additionally, when a business does not fulfill all the investment criteria but may be interesting in the future, Michael is able to track these potential targets within the platform. Sourcescrub enables continuous tracking of revenue estimates and data signals like employee count, senior management changes, and award nominations.
“Sourcescrub data signals are extremely insightful for knowing whether a private company is growing and has potentially become more relevant than when they were initially identified,” says Michael. “I’m able to tag the targets I’m interested in and then Sourcescrub automatically sends me alerts whenever they are added to a new source, have a major product announcement, or receive industry recognition.”
Replacing manual company research and data entry with Sourcescrub’s deal sourcing platform saves Michael significant time while also improving results, including a 6x increase in research and sourcing productivity. “Going from a company name on a webpage to actually reaching out to someone used to take at least thirty minutes, maybe longer,” reveals Michael. “Now it takes just five minutes from identification to curation of a targeted approach, essentially enabling me to spend time on the more valuable part of the process.”
Not only does GCP gain 200+% time savings on CRM data syncing, the team also recently used Sourcescrub to support a major data project. “We had about 800 contacts that were outdated and missing key information,” shares Michael. “Instead of having to manually scrub and update each one, we put the list through Sourcescrub and it automatically amended and updated all 800 contacts in just a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise. Plus, we were able to add some data points to all records that we previously hadn’t captured.”
Michael is now able to focus on more strategic, higher value tasks, like crafting personalized outreach emails and building meaningful relationships with relevant targets. “The market continues to be increasingly competitive,” he says, “so building relationships with businesses as early as possible makes a huge difference. Not only does Sourcescrub help me identify attractive platform businesses, but we have also been able to accelerate potential M&A identification across multiple portfolio investments. This has led to a 50% annual boost in sector-specific lead volumes.
“In a short period of time Sourcescrub has become embedded in how we research and identify potential targets,” says Michael. “The CRM plug-in and readily available contact details have allowed me and my colleagues to spend time focusing on quality of output. In time, I would expect this to translate into an increased quantum of high quality business relationships, ultimately increasing the likelihood of successful investment partnerships despite the competitive environment.”
