DPI Insight: Our Approach to Value-Add
By Runa Alam, DPI Co-founding Partner and Chief Executive Officer
One of our key objectives in working with portfolio companies is for them to benefit from our Value-Add approach.
This is a distinctive DPI offering. By investing considerable time and resources, we have developed a world class bench of experts, focused on supporting our portfolio companies. This active, day to day service to our companies lies at the heart of our close relationships with their management teams.
Our approach to Value-Add rests on three key principles, which are well understood within our portfolio and Firm:
- First, we are an ambitious and supportive partner. DPI is not management. Our goal is to bring world-class support to management from the DPI team and its wider network. Our pan African team and London head office mean we can connect the continent and bring significant experience to our companies.
- Second, we bring support across the entire deal lifecycle. The Value-Add team engages from the start with management to understand their vision, and through commercial and operational diligence develops a granular perspective on value creation. The team works closely with management teams to create a plan, followed by an in-depth strategy session to ensure that everyone’s visions are aligned and enable the DPI team to roll up their sleeves to actively support management.
- The last principle centres on our investment and Value-Add professionals working together as “one integrated deal team” all the way through from sourcing to exit, in order to bring the best of DPI to our portfolio companies.
Our team members bring broad experience from across a multitude of fields, such as corporate and growth strategy, operations, and Lean Six Sigma implementation, as well as regional expansion. The team also possesses significant expertise in post-merger integration and synergy capture work. More specifically, the team also has experts on individual aspects of corporate finance critical to our value-add work, such as balance sheet and working capital optimisation, as well as capital project execution and vertical integration opportunities. The Firm’s large bench of experts from across geographies and functions are frequently deployed to support companies throughout the deal lifecycle.
DPI’s expertise and track record also enables us to assist with digital transformation across multiple industries – notably financial services and FMCG.
Moreover, although DPI is not a “turnaround” firm, we have successfully helped several businesses return to profitability and growth.
Examples of our partnering
Food Concepts
Our work with Food Concepts, a leading West African quick services restaurant chain, reveals the effectiveness of DPI’s model for establishing strong relationships with portfolio companies. This was a turnaround – Food Concepts had lost touch with its core emerging middle classes consumers, required investment in its assets, and needed to tighten up governance. We immediately took highly effective actions, such as implementing an affordable value strategy to reconnect with middle-class customers, creating a “sweat the assets” programme, and resolving historic litigation and disputes, among other issues. DPI’s support transformed the company.
Our impact in numbers
- 89% EBITDA CAGR (2016-2019)
- 43% Revenue CAGR (2016-2019)
- 180 branches, against 58 at investment
- 4,000 staff, compared with 700 at investment
- 57% of Food Concepts’ leadership is now female, as well as 53% of all staff
B.TECH
We partnered with B.TECH to create the largest integrated omni-channel retailer and consumer finance platform of household appliances in Egypt. We heavily supported management with strategy work, including annual strategy retreats; a retail excellence programme, which doubled sales in pilot stores and has since been rolled out to the entire estate; scaling the online delivery business; and significant operational assistance.
Our impact in numbers
- 74% Revenue CAGR over three years
- No 1 by market share in Egypt
- No 2 eCommerce player in Egypt
- 91 branches, against 50 at investment
