CIL is a growth strategy specialist that works across the investment cycle, helping investors and management teams to accelerate growth, create value and maximise commercial opportunities.

How do you work with investors to maximise growth potential?

We work closely with private equity investors throughout the investment cycle, from initial acquisition through to value creation, such as pricing strategies, sales capabilities development, product and international expansion, among others. Further down the line, we also provide vendor commercial due diligence as part of the sales process. Overall, our focus is really to grow revenues and enhance margins.

What are some value creation tools that GPs are using to get ahead in the current market?

Advanced analytics is increasingly becoming a game changer. Most people know that leveraging data will give them an edge, but don’t know how to do it. In recent years, we’ve been investing in hiring a team of data scientists to help our clients understand, firstly, what data is available to them and, secondly, how they can use it strategically to drive growth.

This takes different forms in different businesses, from understanding what is driving customer churn, to maximising pricing power and providing next-level competitor intelligence. Take opening a new site, for example, there are many factors that should be considered to ensure success, such as local demand and demographic mix, drive time, proximity to competitors and so on. Many companies and firms don’t have the capability to crunch all this data in-house, so we explicitly decided to provide it.

As the PE market becomes more competitive, GP clients are engaging more during the hold cycle to bring in greater returns. For instance, while most organisations in the PE mid-market have a decent sales and commercial team, few have a strong grasp of pricing disciplines. We’ve seen more PE focus on optimising their acquisition’s pricing strategy from day one. It is something that is instinctively difficult for firms to do for themselves but provides a good relationship-building project between the investor and the management team as they both begin to understand the firms pricing power together, and then see the returns of that work fall straight to the bottom line. It is hard for everyone not to be satisfied with a revenue gain of £2m, with 100% going straight to EBITDA, which is valued at a double-digit multiple. That is £20m of value right there… which is why we call it ‘value creation’.

Looking at the industry more broadly, how significant of a redefining force is diversity?

From a purely moral standpoint, giving equal opportunity to everybody is the right thing to do. However, it also makes equal sense economically. A mix of different individuals on a team is inherently superior to groupthink. A difference in backgrounds and experiences provides a more creative environment and allows better decision-making.

The consulting industry has had, and continues to have, a lack of diversity. Most environments remain white, male, and from a limited range of socio-economic backgrounds. In short, consulting skews to those with privilege.

One of the main things we can do as company is to encourage those from less privileged backgrounds into the industry. We are proud to have a relationship in the UK with upReach, a charity focused on boosting social mobility. This year we saw our first school leaver placement - in partnership with a London state school - and this is a programme we hope will continue to grow.

What’s on the horizon for CIL?

We analysed how we could accelerate our own growth, and discovered it was largely by expanding globally and putting an increased focus on our value creation capabilities.

We entered the US market four years ago. Even though the US M&A market is buoyant, it’s less-well served by transactional-focus consultancies. Our focus means we understand the investor community better than many competitors and have built our business to bring the speed, efficiency and flexibility that is crucial. Many consultants have gained a bad reputation for coming across as difficult to collaborate with but we have forged a more people centric approach, with the same level of intellectual horsepower to deliver the critical insights, in collaboration with our PE clients.

Overall, our move to the US has been a success, we now have a team of 30 working out of Chicago and are looking at broadening out to the West Coast. We have had seen a similar interest in our German office that opened last year, and we’re excited to be opening a Paris office later this year!