Compusearch had achieved a much more advanced stage of organization maturity. After four years of growth, the company sold for a ~4X multiple of invested capital. The company was recently renamed Unison and, over the past ten years has successfully executed its business and financial plans, completed a handful of accretive acquisitions, and is on track to exceed $100 million in annual revenue. All-and-all a great win-win-win-win-win: for the company, its customers, employees, investors, and the community in which it operates.
The global pandemic has gutted business plans, undercut growth, and derailed operations.
The clock is ticking. Leaders must act quickly to assess the new reality and reset plans to reflect it. But in fact, this is nothing new. Major disruptions happen all the time.
At IntelliVen, we have decades of experience in successful company resets, realignments, pivots, and crisis management. Our Rapid Reset Program guides private-equity-backed companies through resetting their plans to achieve their owners’ investment theses.
Smart leadership teams know a crisis is the time to look for opportunities to grow in ways not previously possible. Great leaders never waste a good crisis. A crisis is the best time to look at things with fresh eyes, eliminate waste, find fresh talent, and grab market share.
But it can be hard to know where to start to put a company back on track to the financial exit targets in place before the crisis. Plus, the relationship between PE investors and their management teams can be undermined by uncertainty and lack planning clarity.
The IntelliVen program provides PE-backed leadership teams with expert guidance, tools, feedback, and strategy support for creating the most effective recovery plans possible.
Meet the Team
Our team of 15 senior operating executives and 20 principals are ready to work with you now.
More from the IntelliVen Team
Proven Path to Rapid Reset
IntelliVen is an operations consulting firm whose principals possess decades of hands-on leadership experience in highly successful PE-backed exits. And each has faced catastrophic events that brought immense challenges to their companies, leading them to take action to re-engage growth and value creation.
PATH TO RECOVERY
Our system is based on our acclaimed program: Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help you Change the World. It guides executives to rapidly reset plans just as we have led recoveries ourselves many times.
Recovery to Success
We have steered companies successfully through major upheavals such as the bursting of the Dot-Com Bubble and the Telecom Bubble, 9-11, the Asian financial crisis, the Housing Crisis, and the Great Recession. We have managed companies through catastrophic disruptions confined to an individual market or individual circumstance, such as suddenly losing 50% of revenue.
Disruption to Growth
We have pooled, organized, and packaged what we have learned to make it available to PE-backed companies. Our program enables these teams to deal with their pandemic-disrupted business plans, get back on track, and identify new opportunities for growth.
The Rapid Reset Program
Designed especially for PE-backed portfolio company CEOs and their management teams, the Rapid Reset Program enables company leaders and investors to collaborate on plans to overcome challenges, refocus on agreed exit criteria and seek out opportunities for accelerated growth in the new environment.
What IntelliVen Provides
Program Components
Recognizing and clearly portraying the new NOW and how it deviates from the company’s original plans is the first step to creating a new, realistic plan to achieve the investment thesis. The IntelliVen Change Framework conveys how things are now, why they must change, how things will be when change occurs, and what must be done to change.
The WWW process guides executives to examine assumptions about the disrupted market and what opportunities are present for creating enterprise value. The process ensures the management team and its investors share a common clarity and alignment around WHAT the company provides, to WHO, and WHY these customers buy it.
With changes in mind and market opportunities understood, the DO-SELL-GROW Framework guides the management team to view their organization as a collection of systems supported by maturing processes conforming to operating model best practices.
The underlying financial model is laid out to measure progress toward goals and to keep things on track. Teams are introduced to best practices for assessing performance relative to their Past performance, against their Plan and against Peers.
PE firms work with leaders who know how to build value and achieve the desired exit target. But even the most experienced executive needs to assemble a like-minded team and ensure it stays aligned. The program guides seasoned operators to decide what kind of leader to be and collect a core group of aligned followers.
Our Heat Maps depict which initiatives are imperative because they can generate the most value in the shortest time. Each imperative is then the focus of a process that engages leadership, team alignment, resource allocation, and accountability.
Senior executives connect to the frontline of progress on imperatives by implementing the IntelliVen Do & Review initiative governance system. The system guides teams through granular analysis of plans, outcomes, learnings, and impacts. As a result, managers can take action to correct and optimize initiatives and address challenges impeding progress.
Portfolio company CEOs and their management teams are guided to effectively use boards of directors and external experts as advisors. This module guides executives to develop a network of advisors who fill knowledge gaps, provide accountability and feedback, as well as informed insight to help them become better leaders.
The portfolio company maturity and leadership team skill mix are assessed relative to success norms by stage of venture maturity. Strategies for team and team member development, support, culling, and hiring are developed to improve the odds of success.
The management team is guided to use its board of directors and board meetings for maximum value. IntelliVen Principals with deep experience as both executives and board members help to formulate board meeting structures and processes that encourage collaboration, effectiveness, growth, and accountability.
