Life at a mid-market private equity (PE) firm is uniquely challenging, demanding a blend of strategic vision, operational expertise, and the ability to execute under pressure.
Unlike larger private equity houses, you may be operating with fewer resources and juggling a wider variety of responsibilities. From deal sourcing to financial analysis, operational acumen to stakeholder management, you have a broad range of responsibilities.
Alongside all of this you must keep up to date with a fast-moving market to ensure that you get the best terms for your debt financing. Without an in-house capital markets team, you are structuring complex debt structures aligned to your portfolio company’s needs, building your own lender relationships and monitoring investments for upcoming risks and opportunities in your debt portfolio.
At Termgrid we have been helping executives like you to simplify the debt financing process for over five years.
In that time we have learned a lot about the process of arranging and managing debt deals.
Here are some of our top tips.
1. Be Prepared
Get organized ahead of time. Map out the different stages of a deal and track progress against it. Establish clear timelines for document reviews and due diligence, including deadlines for document submissions.
If you are using advisors, engage them early and ensure that they have visibility into the timeline. Ensure that key documents are reviewed by the right experts – legal, financial or tax – before they are shared in the data room.
2. Clear communication
Once you have mapped out your timeline, make sure everyone knows about it. Excel spreadsheet, weekly emails or conference calls – there are lots of ways to manage the process. While you don’t have to have a centralized platform, it certainly makes things easier.
Timelines can be mapped, tasks assigned and progress tracked. Inbox to inbox emails can be monitored and recorded against your deal.
Forget searching across multiple systems for updates and reports, your deal dashboard is your new best friend.
3. Digitize your process
Whether you are reaching out to 1 lender or 20, the due diligence process can put significant pressure on a private equity firm and your portfolio company.
Start with a consistent file naming convention and logical folder structure. Provide an index or folder structure to allow lenders to navigate the documents.
Smart tags enable you to permission and alerts users to key documents quickly and easily based on criteria such as “direct lender” or “bank lender”.
Share grids online with redline and heat map functionality to allow you to compare bids and rounds in a smooth and timely manner.
Find out more about our Term sheet functionality here.
4. Focus your time
It goes without saying that you simply don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel or the lender relationship with every new deal. It is natural that you rely on a number of strong relationships. But how can you tell the difference between kicking the tires and a deep dive?
Termgrid’s dataroom gives you the intel you need. Work smarter with the partners who really want to do your deal.
5. Set yourself up to scale
Right now, getting this deal done is the most important thing. But there will be other deals and other lenders.
Using a dataroom that is tailored to the private capital process ensures that you are building scaleability into your process.
With Termgrid, your data is automatically captured and digitized. You can not only track changes across this deal – but across all of your deals.
View and compare term sheets across versions or deals.Visualize your debt across your portfolio and lender relationships. .
If you would like to know more about how an end to end platform like Termgrid can help you, talk to us today.
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