Words John McCrea
Whether you’re a corporate finance boutique, or one of the Big Four, origination is the lifeblood of your business. Finding those opportunities before other competitors is therefore vital.
Corporate finance teams use Beauhurst to find, research, and win new mandates every week.
“Beauhurst is a game changer. They get the fast-growth scaleup market better than anyone else in the UK.”
Partner at one of the ‘Big Four’ firms
If you’ve already defined what your prospects look like and chosen the right tools, this is where you can put that into practice. In this article, we’ll explain precisely how they do it, using real examples from the Beauhurst platform.
Get access to unrivalled data on the companies you need to know about, so you can approach the right leads, at the right time.
Schedule a conversation today to see all of the key features of the Beauhurst platform, as well as the depth and breadth of data available.
We’ll work with you to build a sophisticated search, returning a dynamic list of organisations that match your ideal customer profile.
Boot up Advanced Search. This is your starting point for finding any information about the UK or German business economies.
The first step on your origination journey is defining your firmographic criteria. Start with the basics: add industries, location, and company maturity. You’ll also want to specify that they’re active, just to filter out any companies in distress.
If your firm specialises in areas like owner-managed businesses approaching an exit, you may also want to filter for founder-owned companies where the founder retains a significant portion of the business.
You can also filter out PE-backed businesses. A company with a PE firm on the cap table may well already have an incumbent adviser and potentially a defined exit strategy already.
Your firm’s mandate profile will determine exactly how you configure this layer. The principle is the same regardless: define the structural boundaries of your market precisely, and let Beauhurst do the filtering at scale.
After step one, you should have the right type of company. This step helps align the results to companies with a financial profile that matches your ideal clients.
Apply turnover range, EBITDA bracket, and headcount to remove businesses that are too early to transact and those that are too large or complex for your mandate profile.
Most corporate finance firms have a broadly consistent view of what their sweet spot looks like. Beauhurst lets you enshrine that criteria precisely, rather than relying on individual analysts to make the same judgement call each time.
This is also where consistency becomes commercially important. When every member of an origination team is working from the same financial parameters, the quality of the shortlist is predictable — not dependent on who ran the search.
To further qualify your origination targets, this step moves the prospecting list from companies that meet your mandate profile to highly-relevant opportunities that could be reaching an inflection point where your services are required.
The criteria here are around people as much as the companies. For example, a long-serving director who founded the business over twenty years ago and still holds a controlling stake is in a fundamentally different position to a recently appointed MD brought in by an institutional shareholder.
The former is approaching a natural inflection point, such as potential succession planning, where the question of what comes next is more salient. The latter is operating within a structure that has already answered that question.
To refine your search, consider adding a director appointment date and a ‘Age diversity of directors’ Signal. This could reveal early signs of succession planning, enabling you to act before a competitor.
Other criteria you might consider include recent senior hires, patents awarded, and innovation grants received. These are all indicators of a ‘stealth scaleup’ — a company primed with pre-investment signals.
Once you’ve perfected your search on Beauhurst, you don’t need to build it again. Simply save the search as a template to return to the results at any point.
You can also go one step further by creating a dynamic Collection. Collections are lists of companies that meet a specific criteria, for example the one we’ve outlined in this article.
By setting a Collection as dynamic, new origination targets are added as soon as they meet the previously outlined criteria, and your team is notified. In practice, this means a fully functional origination engine that ensures your firm can be the first to act.
“Beauhurst is proving indispensable to delivering on our ambitious M&A agenda in the UK and Germany, enabling us to be engaged with shareholders earlier and accelerating our M&A pipeline.”
Joshua Burdass, M&A Assistant Manager
The teams generating consistent mandate flow are doing something fundamentally different from their competitors. Not only have they defined their market, but they’ve built an origination engine with triggers that inform them of the right time to move.
Beauhurst gives corporate finance origination teams the data and the workflow to do exactly that — moving from a broad market to a prioritised shortlist, updated automatically, giving them a huge advantage over competitors.
Want to see the platform in action? Take a quick online tour, or to try Beauhurst, get in touch with our team using the form below.
Latest articles
