M & A Beauty Parades – Proposals Pitches Beauty Parades

When a prospective management team has to face the real life Dragon’s Den of Trade or Private Equity buyers they only get one chance. They need to present well as a team and be confident under sustained questioning.

This beauty parade and how their proposals or pitches land can change their lives and affect or derail the sale.

And the stakes are too high to leave anything to chance!

Time is always tight on these jobs. They often need to be carried out covertly without the rest of the company knowing what is going on.

I am retained by Investment Banks or PLCs to get the prospective management team ready for the sales process. For the proposals, pitches, beauty parades and whatever else comes their way – the off-campus dinners and drinks and 1-2-1 meetings that are never supposed to happen – but often do.

These Beauty Parades are very high pressure and exhausting because there is no middle way. Only Good or Bad. Sold or Not Sold.

I work on the teamwork, presentations and positioning of the team while the Investment Bank/Advisers focus on the content of the presentation.

Case Study: UK INDUSTRIAL PLC

This PLC retained me to prepare the prospective management team for a series of Beauty Parades with UK, European and US Investment Banks. The management team had never worked together (2 of them had never met!) and my job was to meld them into a fluent, cohesive and plausible team. Proposals, pitches, beauty parades – and all in a rush.

I was given 2 days. I needed 4 because we only had the whole team team together in one place for 6 hours – the rest of the work was done with 1 or 2 team members at a time.

After a particularly intensive period of due diligence (it was early 2009 and PE Houses and Trade Buyers were even harder to please than normal) the sale of the division completed 4 months later in mid 2009. The PLC was very happy with the multiples achieved.

This work is the subject of a Non-Disclosure Agreement.