Author: Josh

The Private Equity/Venture Capital industry is numbers-driven, and, while cash flow is important, firms looking to level up their growth need to set goals that go beyond the simple metrics of money-in/money-out. To measure progress and success, firms need to track those goals against Key Performance Metrics (KPIs). 

The KPIs you set will become the firm’s “north star”—the backbone of how you strategize growth, and how you think about the core mission and future of the company. But which KPIs should PE/VCs be focused on, and how can you best monitor and report on those metrics to add value for investors? Read on as we help weed through the noise and determine the top 5 KPIs your firm should be tracking. 

5 KPIs Your Firm Should be Monitoring 

1. Time Spent Sourcing

   Time is one of your firm’s most valuable assets (time is money, after all). The on-the-clock time your team puts into researching and sourcing deals and opportunities is a critical component of the firm’s scalability.

   Because payroll is the major fixed expense of any deal sourcing, tracking time spent sourcing arms your firm with a full understanding of deal sourcing costs and unveils process inefficiencies so you can adjust for the better.

2. Number of Quality Deals (and their sources)

   Along with how long it took to secure you a deal, you’ve likely heard the question “Where did this deal come from?” once you’ve closed it. If your firm isn’t tracking 1, the overall number of quality deals (ie: those that have converted through your funnel), and 2, the source of said quality deals, you could be losing out on the ability to hone in on a quality lead source to replicate for future deal sourcing.

   By tracking the source for every deal—quality or not—your firm can better understand the deal sources to allocate more time to, and those that are not bringing any value.

3. Frequency and Touch Points

   The process in closing a deal differs from firm to firm, but regardless, your team needs to check-in and communicate to nurture that lead from an opportunity to a secured deal. That’s where measuring your frequency of communication, and overall number of touchpoints, comes into play.

   Tracking the number of outreach points throughout the deal closing funnel helps answer questions like “what’s our average time to close a deal,” and “how many times did we have to check-in to close this deal?” 

   By monitoring these performance metrics, you can arm your sales team with the data they need to understand when, and how often, to communicate throughout the sales process. You can also unlock areas where your team may be over-communicating, under-communicating, or need some refinement in their messaging to better tailor the conversation to a deal’s stage at any given point in the funnel.

4. Cash Flow

   To put it bluntly, no one wants to invest in (or own) a company that’s not making money. Cash flow is a key performance metric that clearly shows investors how much cash a company is generating.

   Firms can measure cash flow on EBITDA—the acronym for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. EBITDA is the leading indicator of a company’s financial performance and potential to earn, and is what will help the investor determine their ROI (ie: if they’ll be able to sell the company for more than what they invest upfront).

5. Industry-Specific Metrics

   We hate to be vague, but each industry and business will also have its own unique metrics to track against. Do your research to learn the drivers moving the needle in your specific industry to understand what you should be concentrating on.

Monitor and Report on Your Key Performance Metrics

Once you have your set of KPIs, you’ll want to monitor and report on them regularly (weekly, if not daily). By keeping a close eye on your firm’s performance against your KPIs, PE/VCs will be better able to adapt and pivot if needed in real-time, unlocking new areas of growth and success throughout the firm. 

Through leveraging the use of automation platforms designed for PE/VCs (like Altvia), firms can integrate all of their data into one centralized platform and run reports at the click of a button, providing more time to interpret that data and make actionable decisions. 

For example, before integrating Altvia at their firm, Spire Capital was relying on spreadsheets for putting together labor-intensive and time-consuming reports, such as recording financials for their portfolio companies, providing information for monthly financial reviews, and producing quarterly and annual reports. 

With Altvia’s help, Spire Capital implemented a custom dashboard, providing immense time savings and increased transparency across the business. The firm can now use their custom dashboards to easily pull up mark-to-market valuations (cost, fair market value, etc.) at a fund level for each portfolio company, empowering them to better serve LPs. 

Add Value with Data-Driven Dashboards

Through automated platforms designed to help firms better visualize their data, PE/VCs can provide investors with data visualization that provides deeper value and insight than a spreadsheet ever could. 

With Altvia’s platform, firms can simplify investor communications and drive LP loyalty through a modern experience that includes interactive dashboards, videos, and charts that bolster engagement. With features like ShareSecure, firms can easily create custom KPI dashboards to share with investors through a secure link—no .csv downloads or multiple email attachments required. 

There’s a lot of data available to PE/VCs today, which means there can be a lot of noise when it comes to determining the metrics your firm uses to define success. While these five key metrics can help your firm track success, it’s worth noting that each industry and business will have its own unique metrics to measure. 

To revamp your KPIs and set up custom reports and dashboards to arm investors with the data they really want, contact our team to get started.

The industry has seen a significant uptick in investor demand for better-performing deals and asset classes, and a solid investment management strategy is a core component in meeting that demand. As part of that strategy, Private Equity and Venture Capital are evolving not only to better understand the immense value data and analytics can bring to the firm, but also meet the needs of stakeholders demanding greater transparency in reporting ​​and more insight into valuation processes. 

With private equity firms experiencing a rising pressure to utilize both data generated from operations as well as the industry, PE/VCs need to not only understand the value of their data generated through internal operations (and how this might affect the information provided to investors and key stakeholders) but also how to use a combination of company-generated and industry-level data throughout the entire investment lifecycle—from unlocking new opportunities within the market to making better-informed decisions.

So how can your firm’s investment strategy benefit from data-driven insights, specifically? Read on to find out. 

Better Analysis Starts with Better Access to Quality Data

Without access to quality data, firms put themselves at risk of making ill-informed decisions.  However, to fully leverage the power of data and analytics, many firms will need to upgrade their data infrastructure to incorporate AI and machine learning – critical components to drive innovation. 

Thankfully, due to the rise in demand, PE/VC-specific software solutions are available that can help firms shift from manual spreadsheet analyses and forecasts and projections (which are highly prone to human error) to a more streamlined portfolio monitoring process.

For example, before streamlining their data and reporting, RCP Advisors had data and information scattered across spreadsheets and team members. They were running inefficient processes to try to make sense of it all. After implementing Altvia’s software solution, the firm was able to automate and enhance the reporting capabilities that they had been running manually, significantly improving their ability to present data in a usable format.

With these newly enhanced reporting capabilities, RCP is armed with more informative, more insightful, and more accurate data, empowering them to make better-informed decisions throughout the deal stage.

The Role of Data in Analyzing, Forecasting and Evaluating Investments

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, 77 percent of PE executives conducted due diligence data analytics, while 68 percent utilized it during negotiations. From sourcing through to monitoring, data plays a critical role in each stage of the investment management funnel, and the ability to gather large groups of data together in a digestible format will help provide a more efficient and profitable business.

Perform Stronger Due Diligence 

In the research and due diligence phase of a deal, firms can leverage data and analytics both internally and from the industry to look beyond the information provided at face value to better inform their decision-making. The pre-deal stage includes leveraging third-party online sales data to identify category trends, pricing, and validating assumptions about a brand before moving forward. 

Unlock New Growth Opportunities

When it comes to value creation plans, data and analytics provided through AI can help speed up the process while unveiling new growth opportunities. With broader data sources, firms can better understand the market, uncover consumer behavior and trends, and even develop data-driven insights to attract new customers.

Track Progress and Pivot in Real-Time

Along with unlocking new opportunities, sophisticated portfolio monitoring software (like Altvia’s!) can provide deep insights to help PE/VCs track progress against their investment management strategy and use new information to identify underlying issues, empowering them to pivot and course-correct in real-time.

Enhance Value for Portfolio Members

Finally, PE/VCs can leverage data and analytics to formulate a solid story to demonstrate the value created for portfolio members. For example, by leveraging both market and internal data, firms can more efficiently analyze businesses throughout the entire sale process and demonstrate robust data-driven strategies for portfolio members.

Level Up Your Investment Management Strategy

Data and analytics are invaluable tools for any firm’s investment management strategy and provide powerful insights surrounding portfolio monitoring and pre-acquisition research. But they also play a major role throughout every stage of the deal funnel—from due diligence to monitoring.

It’s no secret – to remain relevant in today’s market, businesses need to think about, and take action toward, how they’re making an impact on the planet. After all, sustainability is the new aspiration for companies, and the key to achieving it is developing enhanced ways to measure ESG initiatives, performance, and overall impact.

However, measuring ESG performance is easier said than done. So how can PE/VCs ensure they’re on the right track? It starts by determining how to measure the relative value of any given ESG metric and understanding the pitfalls to avoid misleading investors along the way. 

Understanding ESG Performance

At its core, ESG performance is a measurement that shows how a company is performing against set criteria of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) values. This measurement is used by investors to fuel decision-making and compare brands against competitors. ESG performance is also a leading factor consumers and employees use to determine if a brand is aligned with their values before deciding to do business with or work for them. 

When it comes to comparing ESG ratings, three main approaches are used by investors: 

1. Comparing ratings to peers managing comparable portfolios
2. Leveraging a standard industry benchmark index
3. The investor’s history and internal data

However, each approach comes with caveats. The appropriateness of each depends on an investor’s particular situation, including the risk profile of the portfolio, the composition of stakeholders, and any fiduciary obligations. 

Comparing ESG performance is not an apples-to-apples game, though. When comparing specific ESG performance indicators, investors are often misled, given how much ratings can vary by industry, company, and value point.

Measures that Mislead Investors

Because one of the biggest challenges in measuring ESG performance has been the lack of consistency surrounding industry benchmarks and performance measurement metrics, investors face challenges when evaluating performance. This becomes increasingly tricky when comparing the performance of one company to another, including competitors. 

Whatsmore, most ESG data available is often self-reported by companies, which means there are significant gaps in data availability, not to mention somewhat biased information. 

Measurement also often fails to provide insight into messy underlying processes. For example, data shows that adding women to executive teams will produce better outcomes. However, that data point doesn’t take specific outcomes into account, such as decision-making that reflects diverse perspectives. This is why investors must look beyond the numbers to learn how, why, and under what circumstances the decisions came about. 

Performance Pitfalls to Avoid

It’s recommended that firms follow a “zoom in, zoom out” approach. This means “zooming in” to focus on better integrating ESG factors and their values within the portfolio while also being sensitive to issues of concentration, tracking errors, and risk. By “zooming in,” firms can create risk frameworks that pinpoint ESG threats and failures. By “zooming out,” they can better understand issues and underlying processes while gaining insight into bigger-picture strategies and opportunities. Without a broad and narrow look at investments, PE/VCs risk missing opportunities to improve performance. 

Finally, it’s imperative to maintain a single source of truth for ESG benchmarks and metrics. A trusted, reliable data source that arms management teams with confidence in their numbers and transparent reports for investors is critical to effectively measure ESG performance.  

Track and Measure Your ESG Performance with Altvia

To track and measure ESG performance with confidence, your firm needs to rely on the right tools to effectively transform your ESG commitments and data into transparent reports for your stakeholders. 

To turn your goals into an operational ESG strategy and effectively measure your progress along the way, a tool like Altvia can help. From evaluating risks, to monitoring competitor insight and internal performance, Altvia’s software can arm your firm with transparent, quantified metrics on the impact of your ESG initiatives. 

To see how Altvia can supercharge your firm’s ESG initiatives and performance tracking, contact a member of our team to start a conversation.

If you’ve made a smart investment in purpose-built fund management software for your firm, you want to be sure that it continues to deliver the maximum benefit to your team members.

The best fund management software solutions, like ours at Altvia, don’t require a great deal of upkeep. But it can be helpful to take a fresh look at your system periodically to ensure you’re getting all you can out of it.

With that in mind, below are 10 actions you can take.

1. Create new dashboards and reports. It’s a good idea to review the data you’re getting out of your system now and then to see if there’s other information that would be helpful, new ways to summarize your data, etc.
2. Add metric tracking. For more insight into the performance of your funds, consider tracking metrics associated with your investments.
3. Develop print-ready tear sheets. Simple, print-ready reports are an easy way to streamline the compilation of reports for weekly meetings or any other reports you manually compile regularly.
4. Add user licenses. If you have multiple users sharing the same login information, you should consider getting more user licenses. Having everyone access the system with their own credentials enables you to track who changed which records, and sometimes more importantly, who deleted a record.
5. Perform database cleanup activities. Deleting obsolete reports, cleaning up list views, and removing duplicates is critical to maintaining the value of your data. It can also support higher user adoption, as people quickly lose trust in a “dirty” data source.
6. Update screens. Along the same lines as data cleanup, removing fields that aren’t being used and eliminating near-duplicate fields contributes to the usability of your system.
7. Automate additional processes. Look for tasks that are currently being performed manually outside of the system—like in spreadsheets—and consider having your system do them for you.
8. Conduct training. Any investment you make in training new users or expanding the system knowledge of existing users benefits both your firm and the stakeholders you interact with.
9. Add validation rules. Consider adding validation rules to your system. They ensure that data added to the system is complete and correct. If it’s not, the user is prompted to make corrections.
10. Create or expand workflows. Workflows help make tasks as efficient and effective as possible. For example, you can set up workflows to automatically update records, send out emails, assign tasks when deals move to the next stage or when they get rejected, and more.

Create the Fund Management Software Solution You’ve Envisioned

Every firm is unique. For that reason, while Altvia solutions are designed with best practices in mind, you can, nevertheless, optimize your fund management software the way that best meets your needs. And, if your needs change, you can tweak our fund management software solutions so that they evolve with your firm.

Considering implementing fund management software or replacing your existing system? See our industry-leading solutions in action. Request a fund management software demo today!

What really matters when you’re talking about investor relations? Fundraising and firm performance. To set fundraising teams up for success, they need the proper fundraising software.

Businesses of all kinds use CRMs to manage everything from contacts to relationships to meetings. Salesforce is an excellent example of a CRM that is used by many private equity firms. As the #1 CRM solution in the world, Salesforce is a powerful platform, but you need to use it right for it to be effective. 

Often, private equity firms struggle to customize their CRM to fit their very specific needs. For example, Crosslink is an investment firm whose investments range from early-stage private companies to well-established public corporations. Their team adopted the Salesforce CRM but confusion arose almost immediately on how to structure the system for their needs. 

Crosslink’s investor base is made up of large organizations that often have smaller subsidiaries that need to be tracked and managed separately. Data on these smaller divisions, however, needs to be rolled up to the umbrella organization so that Crosslink can understand the entire organization’s portfolio and which fundraising activities have taken place throughout the organization. Crosslink found it difficult to properly track these activities in a standard Salesforce setup.

This is where implementing a fundraising software built for the industry, powered by Salesforce makes an enormous impact. Altvia is made exclusively for private equity firms and knows the structure that works best for the industry. The software is structured based on our knowledge of what has been successful at other firms and enables the quick setup of a system that supports fundraising.

Watch the video below to get an overview of how Altvia can accelerate fundraising by prioritizing your most engaged LPs, and targeting new LPs who fit the ideal profile.

Targeting the Right Investors

To thrive in private equity fundraising, firms need to identify the right investors, connect with them, and use data to differentiate themselves.

If firms aren’t identifying the right investors, they won’t win. The wrong investors make it impossible to quickly close and generate favorable returns. The right fundraising software should focus on targeting LPs and investors who fit a specific profile. 

Altvia helps firms find LPs who fit the bill and prioritize the most engaged investors. Within Alvia, the account page contains a wealth of information that can be automatically enriched by third-party data providers, such as Preqin. With this data, firms can find investors searching for specific investment opportunities, and learn their past activity and future plans. You can also use filters to find fundraising prospects that passed on the previous opportunity but requested that you follow up with them during the next fundraise.

Seeking LPs with the right focus and credentials? Altvia allows you to easily view important KPIs and activities from a customized dashboard. These dashboards are interactive, enabling easy drill down on specific information to reveal more detail. 

Altvia also makes it easy to track relationships associated with an investor account. You’ll be able to identify the contact information for employees as well as other industry connections like former employees and placement agents. You can also view previous interactions with this account for firm-wide transparency and the ability to craft more personalized communication. 

Execute and Optimize Investor Relations Communication

Once you know who the right investors are, it’s time to connect with them. 

With the right tools, your Investor Relations team will be liberated from mundane tasks and able to focus on key relationships. Data from all investor touchpoints can be used to deliver thoughtful and contextual interactions and provide the on-demand transparency LPs crave while reducing the burden of one-off requests.

Every step of the investor relations lifecycle can be streamlined and organized with Altvia so you can simplify investor communications using data and leverage tools to send out fund news or critical documents to the right people at the right time—automatically. For example, email campaigns can be sent with a click, and engagement with messages is monitored so you can understand how prospective investors respond to your messages and improve future communication. 

Differentiate with Data

Investors have options and it pays to stand out. What is your firm’s “edge” and how do you plan to create a better experience for investors that builds trust? 

Your team can easily pull objective data from Altvia to communicate the firm’s track record, ongoing execution of investment thesis, and key points of differentiation. These metrics can be conveyed through activities like investor nurture campaigns, which can include information about your firm’s niche, market learnings, portfolio company performance, and announcements of upcoming events. 

With Altvia, you can see if a specific contact has opened your emails or had a chance to view a critical document. If it looks like they have, you could give them a call and ask if they have any questions. Notes about your call can be stored and shared with the team. 

Direct integration between Altvia and Gmail or Outlook lets you access all of your CRM data directly from your inbox. This streamlines communication and allows account activity to be tracked without having to switch back and forth between systems. 

Adopting the right fundraising software helps to identify the right investors, improves the investor’s experience during the fundraising process, and ensures continued investment and future funding.

If you’re looking for more guidance on fundraising software and ways to improve your use of Salesforce, contact Altvia for a demo.