Founded in 1978, NES Fircroft has been delivering workforce solutions to the global energy industry for over 40 years, supplying technical and engineering personnel across the energy, chemicals, and life science markets. Headquartered in England with more than 80 offices in 45 countries, NES Fircroft is dedicated to helping its clients accelerate the transition to sustainable energy production and secure a brighter future for generations to come.
The corporate development team at NES Fircroft is responsible for helping the firm gain market share in target industries, expand its capabilities into new geographies, and provide team members with opportunities that drive additional value for clients. For years the team used spreadsheets to manage its M&A contacts and pipeline, making identifying, researching, and keeping track of information about potential acquisition targets a highly manual and time-intensive process. It also required them to work around data gaps for smaller, bootstrapped companies and those in regions like the Middle East and Latin America.
“We look for acquisitions all around the world and across eight different segments,” shares NES Fircroft’s VP of Corporate Development, Jonathan Ung. “It’s impossible to stay on top of all of that manually. We needed a much faster and more reliable way to find and evaluate potential investment targets, especially those that were founder-owned and proprietary.”
With the landscape shifting constantly, the company’s ability to pinpoint ideal targets early on and speak intelligently about a space requires keeping a constant pulse on market dynamics. “You only have one shot to build a relationship with most company owners, and if you make a bad first impression it’s hard to fix,” says Jonathan. “Today you have to provide immediate value and relevant expertise if you want to stand out and get a call back.”
Having used Sourcescrub’s deal sourcing platform at a previous private equity firm and investment bank, Jonathan knew exactly the tool NES Fircroft needed to stay on top of the market, rebuild its database, and develop meaningful relationships with top opportunities
“I’ve evaluated and used other data service providers and deal sourcing platforms in the past, and they just don’t hold a candle to the breadth and depth of global information that Sourcescrub is able to provide, particularly on private, founder-owned businesses,” says Jonathan. “They have data from millions of sources like conference lists and industry guides, and I love that we can also submit our own sources and they’ll scrub them for us in no time.”
Using Sourcescrub, Jonathan is able to search and filter these sources by NES Fircroft’s specific investment criteria across countries and markets, such as renewables, life sciences power, and chemicals. He is then able to build comprehensive lead lists and tag specific companies for immediate follow-up. Sourcescrub also provides highly accurate contact information for company owners and operators, making it easy to get in touch with decision makers and start building relationships.
Data signals like employee count, capital raises, conference attendance, and executive hires not only help Jonathan zero in on the right opportunities, but they also give him compelling reasons to reach out to top targets. Sourcescrub enables users to save searches and monitor new data signals for competitors, opportunities, and portfolio companies. This helps differentiate NES Fircroft by allowing Jonathan to be the first to know and alert others about any changes in the market.
“Sourcescrub not only makes it possible to dig deep and scour an industry, but it also makes data actionable,” says Jonathan. “The ability to reach out to acquisition targets the moment they cross a new threshold or a company in their space gets funding gives us a lot of credibility that we’re on top of the market. It’s easy to break the ice and offer prospects something meaningful from that first interaction, which goes a long way.”
Because Sourcescrub has enabled Jonathan to more efficiently identify, evaluate, and connect with targets in NES Fircroft’s core markets, he has also been able to explore and build pipeline in tangentially relevant sectors such as energy transition. He estimates that the business development team has reduced the time it takes them to research opportunities by 50%.
“NES Fircroft has a strong record of successful acquisitions already under its belt, having completed 8 deals in just 7 years. Thanks to Sourcescrub, we have a much fuller scope of what’s going on in the market, which has allowed us to think further ahead and plan for future growth,” shares Jonathan. “Our pipeline is filled for the next 2-3 years, and we’re able to keep in touch with all of these companies so that we stay top of mind.”
Since choosing Sourcescrub, NES Fircroft has tripled its number of database contacts, improved international deal flow by 150%, and increased its active deal pipeline by 75%. “We’re in a mature market, and to be able to generate this level of M&A activity and this many proprietary opportunities is pretty exciting,” says Jonathan. “It’s amazing to work with Managing Directors who have been in the space for 10-15 years and be able to surface super relevant companies that they’ve never heard of. With Sourcescrub, we’re not missing anything.”
