All you need to know about financial consultancy and advisory services starring Craig Richardson

Welcome to another episode of In hundred days and beyond with our brilliant guest Craig Richardson, who is director at PHD industrial holdings limited. He has spent 14 years working at KPMG undertaking corporate finance and due diligence assignments in UK as a chartered accountant.

Background

Craig went into four big county firms and spent 3 years auditing there. Then he moved to corporate finance mostly dealing with SMEs and business owners. After a number of years, he got involved in acquiring business for investors. He has an experience of over 25 years, advising owners on all aspects of growth, succession, acquisition, MBOs, finance raising, exit planning and strategic advisory. He has also lectured to leading banks on how to assess the competence of management teams.

Transition period from Finance corporate to advisory

Craig says, the transition doesn’t happened overnight. When you start audit in a company as a finance corporate, you go to business owners and ask them questions. The problem you face is that you don’t actually know what you’re supposed to know and what you don’t know. With the passage of time you start to realize what you should know and shouldn’t know. That’s the moment of confidence as an advisor. He says, it’s about being a mentor, advisor and quite often the management teams you’re dealing with. So the big transition is how the board table acts.

Leading banks – assessing the competence of management teams

In Craig Richardson’s view, to have a successful business you’ve got to have a successful model and a good management team. The trickiest thing is buying businesses without management team and recruiting team is much harder. So it’s better to get a management team but they are still coached by the owner on what to say and what not to say. Culture is very difficult in an acquisition and you’ve got to have a leap of faith when you buy a company. The key thing is to make sure that you only acquire the businesses with the biggest customers. Never to invest in a business that is reliant on one or two customers. It’s all about making sure that the value is in the business and not in the people. Craig raised first fund in 2008 with some money from clients with another 2 transactions lined up. Then over the next 3-4 years they invested in 4 others which were really eclectic with 2-3 real winners making a really good return. On the back of that, raising a larger fund, created 6 entities.

Integration

When we acquire a business after agreeing to the price and doing due diligence, to make it successful you need to keep few things in mind that are revealed by Craig Making sure the profit and cash generation of the acquired business will not go backwards. Only invest in the businesses that’s been going for a long time. The key thing is the margin and getting the right people involved as well, who have got the right experience from outside the company rather than self grown business owner. Craig Richardson has shared an amazing journey of sharing a lot of winning formulas These were a few of them. Tune into the podcast to know more

Connect with Craig Richardson

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-richardson-70b61314

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