The Coppett Hill team has recently had the opportunity to work pro-bono with four fantastic non-profit organisations as part of the development of our Searchscope tool. Searchscope allows our clients to understand their current position in Organic Search and identify opportunities for traffic growth. We’ve been doing a lot of work to build out Searchscope’s functionality and reduce the time to insight, and working with these organisations gave us the chance to give something

Having recently joined Coppett Hill, I’ve quickly come to appreciate how central go-to-market (GTM) strategy is to the work we do. When I first started, I had a vague understanding of how this related to customer acquisition, but the specific processes and how to evaluate their effectiveness? Not so much. This became apparent just a couple of months after starting when I was tasked with supporting a due diligence project focused on evaluating the GTM capabilities of a SaaS bu

In the first part of this two-part series, I shared some of the basics of value creation in private equity from the perspective of an individual deal, explaining the basic structure of a private equity deal and the most common value levers. In this second part I want to step back and look at what value creation means from the perspective of a private equity firm and how that impacts management teams of portfolio companies. This post aims to provide you with practical insights

We’ve explained the concept of value creation previously, but in this post we’ll focus specifically at the other end of the private equity cycle. A successful exit is what every private equity investor and management team is looking to achieve, but it requires significant preparation well in advance of the actual sale. In our experience, Marketing & Sales leaders have a critical role to play in supporting an exit. Getting your house in order Preparing for a successful exit

We are still in our relative infancy at Coppett Hill. Dave, our founder, set up Coppett Hill ~14 months ago - we imagine that the way the describe the age of our business will mirror that of the way that someone would describe the age of a small child. Months, up until the 2-year mark, at which point you pivot from months to years. What an occasion for celebration that will be. We've been privileged to work with some really exciting businesses across multiple different sector

"Value Creation" - it's one of the most common terms in private equity today. Increasingly, more private equity firms have in-house value creation teams, and specialist value creation roles. Firms try to differentiate on their ‘value creation playbook’ and capabilities. But what does value creation actually mean in the context of private equity (“PE”)? And what does that look like in practice if you are part of a private equity-backed management team? When I started working

I’ve never been a fan of popularising a management theory or tool unless I’ve been able to use it myself and achieve practical success. Has anyone actually used a SWOT analysis to inform a true strategic decision? Given this, there is one principle from Amazon’s vast collection that I have found incredibly practical when working with private equity-backed Management teams: “working backwards”. What is Amazon’s “Working Backwards” Leadership Principle? As a brief primer, A

The group stages of Euro 2024 are over. And, as promised, the update to our Euro 2024 prediction model has arrived. I’m young enough to have enjoyed a period of remarkable optimism surrounding the England football team. Memories of the disappointment of our Euro 2016 exit against Iceland had been firmly eclipsed by the fervour of 2018, 2021 and 2022. Up until the last 3 weeks, where the England football team collectively decided to abandon ambitions of winning an internationa

The ability to win ‘new client logos’ is one of the most important predictors of future growth for a B2B business. The problem is, assessing this ability isn’t always straightforward, even though there is often no shortage of data available. Deciphering the drivers behind new client logo acquisition can involve navigating siloed datasets, accommodating inconsistent CRM entries and picking apart complicated financial models. More often than not, in our experience, all of these

I’ve been doing some work recently on our LeadScorer tool, which takes a series of prospect attributes and behaviours, and predicts their relative likelihood to purchase. This can then be deployed to prioritise customer outreach and get a feel for overall pipeline value. However, as cases of Euros fever in the Coppett Hill office increased in severity, the lightbulb flickered to repurpose this tool to answer the question on everyone’s lips. Is it coming home? And just l

Have you sat in a Management or Board Meeting of a company in the Business Services sector and thought: ‘how can we get more customers?’ Have you looked at the Marketing line in the annual budget and asked: ‘what would happen if we spent double or half this amount?’. There is no reason that your business shouldn’t be able to answer these questions just as well as the fastest growth ecommerce or VC-feted SaaS platform. When we work with Business Services clients – in categorie

“Google Chrome to block third-party cookies by the end of 2024” – you may have read this headline or one like it, seen it in an article covering any of the major digital advertising platforms like Google or Meta, or even heard it in a board meeting. It sounds like it’s important, but you don’t really know what it means. Does this require “putting too much milk in your tea” or “the house is on fire” level of worrying? You therefore either assume other people will know more abo

CEOs and PE firms alike have mastered the art of value creation through improving financial, talent, and operational efficiencies, but sometimes go-to-market market performance improvements seem to cause more trouble, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in pricing. Though we’ve covered pricing in a previous article, it can feel very theoretical, so I wanted to hear from someone who’s been on the front lines for some more practical advice, and who better to provide that th

Making customer-focused decisions vital to value creation can be an intimidating task when you feel blind to what is going on within your business. In my time at Coppett Hill, I’ve become used to hearing the most common concerns of Chief Executives, Chief Marketing Officers and Private Equity value creation leads. Frequent questions include the measurement of customer lifetime value, which prospective customers to prioritise, and how to improve the customer journey to increas

Your sales team is telling you one thing, your finance team is reporting another, and your cash position doesn’t quite add up. This scenario is incredibly frustrating and concerning as a business leader. As a Board member, I found this situation to be more common than you’d expect, and it was usually a red flag for underlying issues. Often these were symptoms of underlying weaknesses causing revenue leakage—a common yet often overlooked challenge. Revenue leakage – it sounds

We’re continuing our series on alternative indicators of growth, looking at whether any ‘vanity’ metrics are correlated with or predictive of profitable growth, based on the work we do with our clients to create a single customer view across their various marketing and sales data sources. Today we are focusing on enquiry response time – how many times have you filled in an enquiry form on a website and felt like you were just shouting into the void? Our conclusion is that

Many marketing reports I have reviewed over the years have focused on ‘vanity’ metrics like impressions, likes and views - which look impressive on the surface - but made no mention of profit or return on investment (ROI). In the spirit of challenging assumptions, this is the first in a series looking at whether any of these ‘vanity’ metrics are correlated with or predictive of profitable growth, based on the work we do with our clients to create a single customer view acro

Among the many ‘data gathering’ approaches that I learned as a strategy consultant, I always found mystery shopping to be one of the most powerful ways of both understanding the proposition of a business and highlighting an issue with a customer journey or competitive challenge. Ask yourself – when was the last time you mystery shopped your own business, or one you are invested in? If I look at the photo library on my phone from my time at CarTrawler, it is full of screenshot

I once sat in on an expert interview at the start of a market research project, as a silent observer. I had to bite my tongue as the interviewer diligently followed the interview guide and missed several opportunities to dive deeper into a nugget of insight that the expert had touched on. As a junior strategy consultant, leading these expert interviews was a core part of my role so I’ve led hundreds of discussions and probably made every type of mistake along the way. Qualita

The question of “how much to spend on marketing” is one that every business should ask itself. The answer is often “what we spent last year plus a bit more”. Imagine that instead of simply making tweaks from last year’s budget, you had a blank sheet of paper to design a set of activities and costs with the goal of maximising profit growth over a 3-5 year time horizon – a form of ‘zero-based budgeting’. When I took on responsibility for the consumer brands at CarTrawler, I had