As a private equity investor, your objective is crystal clear—maximize value across your portfolio. Speed is a critical component to success, and the clock starts ticking once the diligence process is kicked off. The board wants to see real momentum and traction almost immediately, offering only a very limited grace period while new leaders get up to speed. Unfortunately, far too often, what should be a brief lull in activity turns into an extended period of inactivity. Why does this gap between investment and value-creation exist? We attribute it to four main reasons:
- The organization’s stakeholders do not buy into the fact that future growth will require a fundamentally different approach. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality runs strong in successful B2B SaaS companies, especially those that are still founder-led. The leaders and executives of these companies obviously know a thing or two about successfully growing a business. Yet, in order to set the organization up for future success, these same leaders and executives must buy-in to the fact that achieving post-investment growth and success will require a fundamentally different go-to-market strategy.
- The organization lacks the necessary culture and mindset to foster transformational growth. Employees at all levels need to feel a real sense of ownership and accountability when it comes to post-investment success. It is up to the leadership to create clear and measurable goals and establish a bias toward action and forward progress, even in the face of incomplete information. Calculated risk-taking is encouraged and, as a result, it is clear that small failures or wrong decisions will not be punished.
- Marketing is being undervalued or simply overlooked as a way to create meaningful, scalable value. Unless your portfolio company comes with leaders well-versed in growth marketing, the opportunity to drive quick wins by leveraging underutilized assets and predictable growth through a well-coordinated, highly focused go-to-market strategy will often be overlooked. Instead, resources and time will be spent (and sometimes wasted) pursuing more familiar but less effective paths to growth.
- The organization is pausing on strategic growth marketing initiatives until it hires a new marketing leader. On average, it takes 6-12 months to find, hire, and onboard a new leader. Waiting to find a marketing leader before building a predictable and scalable growth-marketing engine means you are wasting valuable time. If your portfolio company has existing marketing resources, it is likely that they will be tasked with pursuing every tactic that the executive team and board find interesting. This uncoordinated approach is not only highly ineffective at producing meaningful impact, but it will make the team feel overworked and undervalued.
To avoid the dreaded post-investment inertia, private equity companies are increasingly turning to consultants who specialize in post-investment growth strategy. This not only accelerates value creation, but it also allows for a more thorough full-time talent search. These “growth consultants,” who operate as an extension of the existing team, begin by immediately knocking-out quick wins which creates valuable momentum and does wonders for team morale. At the same time, the consultants address foundational elements critical to any successful growth strategy while also aligning the leadership team around a unified growth vision, strategic priorities, and key value-creation tactics to ensure a clear and successful path forward.
About Mosaic Growth Solutions
Mosaic Growth Solutions is a boutique consulting firm specializing in post-investment growth for privately held B2B SaaS companies. Over the past 10 years, we’ve worked extensively with private equity companies and their portfolio companies to achieve measurable results. Our approach ensures that the elements critical to successful growth such as a shared vision for growth and organizational alignment around the potential for value creation, are addressed upfront to maximize productivity and efficiency when we get to work.
Our process is very straightforward. We kick-off client engagements with our 30-day Growth Marketing Assessment which is a highly collaborative and interactive exercise. Most of our engagements begin post-investment, but we are sometimes brought in during the due diligence to get an early start on our discovery and assessment process.
The assessment consists of 4 main components — an evaluation of a company’s existing marketing efforts using the Mosaic Growth Marketing Maturity Framework; a competitive marketing analysis using publicly available data; a deep dive into demand generation performance, and a sales funnel performance review — with the goal of answering 3 critical questions:
- How mature is the company’s existing efforts relative to its existing competitive landscape as well as industry best practices more broadly?
- What is the company doing (and not doing) today that is working to drive demand and revenue growth?
- What are the biggest opportunities to drive incremental growth?
Through the assessment, we are able to establish a performance baseline from which to measure the impact of all future marketing investments and initiatives. The 30-day process culminates in a fully customized 90-day growth marketing playbook. The customized playbook is a highly actionable plan focused on delivering “quick wins” while also addressing critical foundational growth marketing elements with speed and efficiency. Each recommended tactic and strategy is tied to an estimated impact on key performance metrics to ensure the focus remains on driving efficient and measurable growth. Then, with management buy-in and support, we transition from strategy to implementation, leveraging our experience, skill set, and know-how to maximize success.
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