Portfolio management is the process of making investment decisions on behalf of vested individuals and institutions, with the goal of maximizing returns. In other words, it's the meat and potatoes of VC and PE firms. Portfolio management is a key component of maximizing returns.
But what if you're not versed on all the strategy and tactics? Luckily, there are a variety of well-recognized techniques and new tools on the market, such as Sourcescrub's portfolio tracking, that deal shops of all sizes can utilize to maximize IRR and build synergy between their portfolio companies.
A Portfolio company is an entity in which a venture capital firm, a buyout firm, or a holding company, invests in. Shorthand, you can refer to all of the companies currently backed by a private equity firm as that firm's portfolio.
The goal of portfolio management is to manage this collection of investments in a fashion that is consistent with the investor's goals, their time horizon for needing the money, and their tolerance for downside risk in their investments.
Within portfolio management, there are a number of factors to consider that affect the success of the project, and thus the organization, as well as unexpected benefits from the investment.
There are generally two metrics that deal shops: industry KPIs and time weighted returns.
Depending on the industry, there will be different key-performance indicators (KPIs) that explain how well a company or collection of companies is doing. This will be industry specific, so what looks like good KPIs for one, will not be the case for another, and a portfolio manager must learn to distinguish.
This is a common method of calculating investment return. Returns are compounded over subperiods, which result in an overall period return. Then, rate of return over each sub-period is weighted and ranked according to duration relative to the whole.
The answer to this question depends on whether you're an old school deal shop or a New School Deal shop. Before we talk about that, there are a few standards that every deal shop looks at.
Also known as stock or equity dilution, is when a company issues new stock, reducing existing stockholders' ownership percentage of the company. Dilution is one way a company can raise additional funds, though it often depresses stock prices. Deal shops are constantly monitoring this to try and predict future behavior and the overall quality of an investment.
Exit strategies include IPOs and sale of the business to another private equity firm or strategic buyer. There are different types of exits: total exits or partial exits. A full exit results in the sale of all VC holdings within one year of the exit, while a partial exit involves sale of only part of the holdings within that period. Knowing what kind of exit strategy you might be looking at with a portfolio is a huge part of managing it.
Every deal shop worth its salt does some kind of economic analysis and forecasting within its portfolio management. How a shop looks at market upturns and downturns for different prospects is a major part of what goes into management and analysis. Tools like Sourcescrub's market intelligence can help identify and differentiate strategies for the best return on portfolios.
Portfolios are often managed by a VC firm or a principal/associate within the fund. Sometimes the CFO is involved, and they analyze and act on monthly reports on revenue, EBITDA, growth, and sales progress. The main strategy of old school deal origination is based on networking, relationships, and relying on your charisma to close deals. But knowing the right people isn't enough as the market grows and becomes more competitive, which has prompted the use of technology and new strategies to source deals.
The New School method of deal origination stands out from the old school method by using a data-driven, strategic, and differentiated approach to finding and closing more and better deals.
One of the seven strategies of New School Deal Flow is data-driven lead scoring, or the process of scoring the viability of prospective investments to determine how well a prospective investment aligns with goals.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is the process of assigning value to each lead generated for businesses, usually based on a numerical point system for ranking to determine sales-readiness. Traditional lead scoring adds and subtracts value based on how certain properties of a lead meet criteria. Predictive lead scoring uses an algorithm to determine if leads in a database are qualified or not qualified based on a number of criteria. Lead scoring models leverage key firmographic data points that meet an ideal investment thesis and apply them as filters against an extensive dataset of companies and sources. Data can include:
The goal of lead scoring is to uncover potential sell-side and buy-side opportunities, and maximize deal origination efforts by enabling data teams with the ability to better landscape the prospective playing field and quickly identify the right investment opportunities.
Analytics
For most firms, tracking and analytics are a central part of several different areas, but especially marketing and web reporting. Tracking and analytics is the process of gathering, analyzing, and applying data, information, and reports related to the content prospects interact with online. Examples of analytics and tracking platforms are Google, SugarCRM, and Salesforce.
Social analytics specifically focuses on the data obtained from content shared on social profiles and the social profiles themselves. Platforms like HubSpot and MailChimp help with this.
Businesses use analytics for a number of reasons:
Data Processing
Data processing tools are used to process and sort data that comes into your organization's workflow. While the humble spreadsheet can often be used for this, more powerful tools like Microsoft Power BI, Xplenty, and HubSpot are common.
Project Management
Teams use different methods for managing projects, depending on the type of project, the workflow required, and the individual tastes of team members. Trello, Asana, Kanban Tool, Kissflow Project, and Airtable are common tools.
Ops Management
There are numerous tools for operations management, some of which might fit into the project management tools listed above. However, ops management is often specific to businesses, so many firms use bespoke tools.
CRMs
Many businesses use CRMs (Customer relationship management) tools for sales, marketing, and management, which can easily be used to track and analyze data to help you create a lead scoring model. Typical features offered by a CRM platform include:
Sales CRMs
Salesforce is the most common option here, with a long tail of small-mid sized business-oriented CRMs also in use (e.g., Streak, Pipedrive, Copper). These solve the core elements of opportunity tracking (stages, reports, etc.), and make it easy to share notes and files with the team, providing efficiency benefits over the typical spreadsheet. Data entry for these systems are still quite manual, and there's a significant mismatch in the workflows and features they were built for (helping sales teams close deals) vs. the ones VCs often use them for.
VC-focused CRMs
This category is just beginning to emerge, with different vendors at different levels of sophistication. Some sample names: 4Degrees, Sevanta, Zaplow, FundStack. The big advantages of a VC-focused CRM is:
Deal Sourcing
Deal sourcing and origination is the foundation for many deal shops. Sourcescrub's platform allows you to gain unparalleled insight into privately held companies with powerful deal sourcing tools that leverage constantly fresh, accurate data. Searching out the unicorn is what Sourcescrub is built for, and it'll give you the data to be successful in your strategy.
When managing the portfolio of a startup, there are a few considerations that differentiate this from normal deal flow. Here are some of the major considerations:
An add-on acquisition is when a private equity firm or other buyer acquires a company and integrates it into an existing company within the buyer's portfolio. Add-ons are generally strategically positioned and sought out to add value to the portfolio or use them to stimulate growth inorganically within a portfolio company.
Add-ons can also be a way of enhancing company value before a sale. Often, this can be called a "buy and build" strategy, where the PE firm attempts to raise the value of a company by forcing its growth, rather than letting it occur naturally. This can massively increase the value of a company, because it:
However, just like with funding a startup, an add-on can sometimes have disastrous results if poorly managed. Read more in our article on the topic here.
There is a large and growing body of techniques and tools companies can use to go beyond "managing" their portfolio and move towards leveraging and strategically deploying their portfolio. We call it the New School Deal playbook. Find out more by checking out our resources.
