ur approach has always been for a global customer base within our active investments, over the last few years we have now expanded this to our passive area of investing. We now have investment teams spread over the world, who we are working with to provide us with a balanced global portfolio.
Our heritage is such that we want to work with teams that love business. Our team has direct experience of owning and managing a number of business themselves and have the passion and energy of an entrepreneur but recognize that not all entrepreneurs have a great new idea. We learned about search fund investing almost a decade ago. We believe search funds represent an ideal vehicle for entrepreneurial managers looking to make the first step on the path to owning and running businesses.
There is no specific model we look for when backing teams, what we are really looking for is to enjoy often a decade long journey working in an advisory role. So what we really care about is being excited about the business opportunity as we believe that if the team loves the business we will find a way of making a sensible economic return from the transaction.
We also look forward to their second step on the journey when they perhaps seek to acquire again and as experienced managers and come back for perhaps larger equity cheques.
This area of investing splits into two types:
We recognise that for more experienced managers, often the traditional search fund doesn’t work, because they may already have a network of investors willing to partially back them. Thus, for teams who don’t fit our Entrepreneur model, we are happy to work with teams on a transaction-by-transaction basis. We are currently engaged with 3 teams on this basis.
