Overview – Creating Long-Term Value
Accretive is a unique private equity firm with a distinctive track record of helping create industry-leading companies. We have a fundamental belief that to be successful we must help CREATE value. We focus on a small number of very high quality situations each year. In addition to the assistance and guidance of a typical private equity firm we are unusual in that we have deep knowledge of what is required to profitably grow each investment we make. Our view is that this does not come from experience (although it helps) it comes from a commitment to thoroughly understand the fundamentals of each individual situation. We spend months, and in many cases years, researching a particular customer pain point to develop the two major pillars of our strategy.
- Understanding in detail how to create significant value for customers – over and above their next best alternative. This value needs to have a clear impact on the customer’s P&L and must be demonstrable to even the most cynical buyer. Our objective is to understand this value equation well enough that our companies should be prepared to guarantee this value to the customer.
- Understanding the critical core competencies required to grow a company that consistently delivers this value for customers and to identify the best executives with those competencies.
We take a long-term approach that commits significant time to each investment and combines our deep understanding of the fundamentals with strong partnerships with customers and management to consistently help create value.
Investment Approach
The Principals of Accretive have developed a distinctive investment approach over the past decade. This approach involves continuous reinvention of how we think about value creation combined with deep market and customer research. In a typical investment, we:
- Identify, study, and understand how value is created for customers
- Develop a clear understanding of sustainable value edges and the competencies required to deliver them
- Find or create a company we believe can be a leader in the market
- Build a relationship based on fairness and trust with a superb team and with customers – ensuring that all of our objectives are aligned
- Invest personal capital of the partners representing roughly one-third of each investment
Value Add – For Management and Shareholders
Accretive is uniquely positioned to work cooperatively with management and other shareholders from Day One. Our thesis-driven, research-intensive approach allows us to quickly understand the goals of our portfolio companies and immediately add value where appropriate.
We are not operators and do not get involved in day-to-day management of the business, but can work with management to add value in a variety of areas including:
- Providing capital (liquidity and/or investment capital)
- Introductions to customers
- Recruiting additional talent
- Evaluating acquisition and business development opportunities
- Implementing best practices and process improvement
- Conducting industry research and competitive analysis
- Strategic analysis and guidance