Challenge
DCD London & Mutual PLC, a venture-capital and private-equity house, needed hands-on ownership of its investee portfolio, not simply passive capital. Each company needed a hybrid of origination, value creation, governance, operational hand-holding and a credible route to exit, all run at once across the full investment cycle. Shared corporate-services modelling was also key to Group profitability.
Solution
As Group Investment Portfolio Director, and Group HR Director, Zed held simultaneous board-level oversight of six to eight investee companies through full investment cycles. It is where the investor’s lens and the operator’s hands first came together. Zed was fully operational in the major Group investments and sat on all the boards, and was credited with saving £500,000 by implementing a shared-services model across HR, IT and Finance.
Results
An average five-times return across the portfolio, one nearer thirty, with a ten-fold revenue increase across the holdings and an IT-division divestment of around £60M. It is the dual investor-and-operator perspective that still shapes how Zed reads a business today.
Do you back businesses, then need them to actually become worth backing?
Capital is the easy part. Value is created hands-on, at board level, across the whole cycle from origination to exit, sometimes having to get your hands really dirty operationally.
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