After a year spent white-knuckling through the COVID pandemic, investment banks are finding themselves drowning in private equity dry powder and buy-side interest. Only firms that find ways to remain agile, differentiate themselves, and move faster than competitors are going to keep up and amplify this momentum going forward.
Kevin Schwab, associate at leading investment banking firm Copper Run, has been on the front lines during this unprecedented run. "It's really important for us to send our clients opportunities that are not at the top of everyone else's lists," he says. "But by the time we finished doing our research and started reaching out to these companies, three weeks had already gone by. We knew we needed to streamline our processes and become more efficient if we were going to take on more clients."
Let's take a look at a few specific ways Sourcescrub helped Copper Run accelerate its time to market by 3x and ultimately double deal engagements.
Kevin and his team of analysts are responsible for sourcing relevant, non-transacted companies and creating lead lists for the firm's private equity clients. But building a single proprietary list used to take up to two weeks of whack-a-mole Google searches and shoe-leather research.
Using Sourcescrub has accelerated the company research and list building process for clients. When engaging with a new firm, the team starts by identifying conference and association lists in Sourcescrub that align with the client's specific industry and geographic criteria.
"We then get more specific and filter these lists by data signals like employee count and ownership type to quickly eliminate companies that aren't a great fit," Kevin explains. "This gives us some quick wins and also provides insight into additional keywords we can use to surface other highly-relevant, non-transacted companies in Sourcescrub."
Data and technology help firms identify the right opportunities with greater speed and precision than ever before. But making sure this data is complete, accurate, and used effectively requires a human touch.
Kevin relies on Sourcescrub's 600-person data operations team to quickly scrub any lists his team finds that are not already in the platform and add them to the data set. "One of the best things about Sourcescrub is that the data is constantly growing and being updated, and it's always extremely accurate," says Kevin.
With the time they've saved, Kevin's team is able to focus on improving their communication and relationship-building. He explains, "Gaining this experience makes the job more enjoyable and also works out better for Copper Run, since we get the opportunity to train on building rapport with clients."
With a wealth of data about the right opportunities and the communication skills to use it effectively, all Kevin's team needed was contact information. While finding accurate emails or phone numbers for bootstrapped executives is extremely difficult to do manually, Sourcescrub delivers.
Not only is Copper Run able to identify and engage opportunities faster than the competition, but they have also seen a surge in target quality. According to Kevin, a majority of the companies on the lists the firm creates for its clients now come from Sourcescrub. "Sourcescrub makes it so much faster and easier to get to the right people," he says.
This has made it possible for Copper Run to get buy-side and sell-side deals to market faster.
"We can now go from engaging a new client, to building out a bespoke lead list, and actively reaching out to high-quality opportunities in a single week," reveals Kevin. "That's a 3x improvement in time to market. We've essentially doubled the number of engagements we can take on, which was our goal from the very beginning."
To learn how Copper Run is improving sell-side private equity outreach, keeping data and lead lists organized, and more, checkout the full case study here.
