What happens the day after closing.
Sellers and their advisors want to know two things beyond price: will you close, and what will you do to the company. The first is answered on the advisors page. This page answers the second.
Three levers, in the same order, every time.
This is what was done at Borsalino and at Fogal, and it is what we will do again. It is not a framework. It is a sequence of work.
Take the chair. Understand the business from the inside.
The founder of OctoFox becomes Executive Chairman and is in the building most days. Product, customers, distribution, manufacturing, suppliers, people. No decisions of consequence are made from a spreadsheet before this is done. Key employees are told the truth about what is going to change, and when.
Rebuild the cost structure, from manufacturing cost to selling price.
Every line between what it costs to make the product and what the customer pays is examined and renegotiated: sourcing, production, logistics, overhead, pricing and margin by channel. Then distribution: which channels earn their place, which do not, and where the brand should be that it is not.
Review the management. Hire the CEO. Step back to the board.
Every manager is assessed against the plan, not against the past. Where the team is right, it stays and gets more authority. Where it is not, we hire. Once a CEO is in place who has been chosen by someone who now knows the business intimately, the chairman steps back to the board with objectives the CEO cannot talk his way around.
Grow the platform. Add bolt-ons.
With a stable platform and a management team that owns its numbers, we grow through adjacent acquisitions: new capabilities, geographies or customer bases. Patient consolidation at this end of the market is one of the most reliable ways to build value, and one of the least crowded.
Strategy without execution is theory. Execution without strategy is activity. The job is the narrow place where both are true at once.OctoFox
Considering a sale, or advising someone who is?
A first conversation is confidential and commits nobody to anything.