Tech or tech-enabled businesses that are shaping the way their industries will work in the future and have a clear vision of the role they will play.
Build Tomorrow
[po-ten-shia]
noun
Potentia is a private equity firm that believes in the transformative power of technology to build tomorrow. As local market, tech specialists we see possibility where others don’t and back great teams to realise that opportunity. Our investments transform the local economy while generating superior returns for our investors, allowing them too, to build tomorrow.
As the only tech-focussed private equity fund in Australia and New Zealand, we aim to develop deep relationships with local technology businesses.
We want to see a thriving local software industry. We therefore invest time and effort with founders and executives over long timeframes. As such, a disproportionate number of our portfolio companies have come to us directly, on an exclusive basis.
We also have an extensive adviser network – people we’ve worked with before and know what we are capable of. If we are part of a competitive sale process, we engage constructively and transparently.
Due diligence for us is both an inside-out and an outside-in process. We’re unapologetically data driven and look to get deep insights from the data the business has available.
Getting to know the people we will be partnering with through the deal assessment period is critically important to us. As with all intellectual property-based businesses, the people are the most important asset of any software business. We know this, and therefore through the diligence period we look to form strong relationships with the management team.
We strive to be a business partner, not just an effective provider of capital. Our team of professionals has a mix of investing and operating skills. It is this combination that enables us to rapidly understand your business and thereby back bold strategies.
In the first 100 days we’ll invest the time to make sure we see the world through your eyes, and will work with you to develop deep alignment between the management and Potentia teams. This period should culminate in a clearly articulated future state of the industry and vision for the business, leading to the development and testing of a comprehensive 5-year financial and operating plan.
Once agreed, we’ll work with you to ensure all key initiatives in that plan are resourced and able to be clearly tracked. As a team we aim to focus on the moments that matter. This means sometimes we’ll be close, but other times we’ll stand back, and provide you the clear space to get on with doing what they do best.
Once we’ve achieved great things together, there will come a time for us to transfer ownership to a new set of investors. When this time comes, we aim to find the right owner for our businesses, one who will continue to invest in the business’ success.
Through the sale process we’ll work hard to ensure that management are not unduly distracted, and the business has the resources to continue to perform.
No two businesses are the same, but being a sector specific investor that has well over 100 years of experience in investing and managing technology businesses, does enable us to see some patterns that we’re able to leverage to help create value for our portfolio companies. Some of these include:
Founders spend time with customers and get a good feel for the art of what is possible, and product bundles and prices tend to get locked in from there. Over time businesses evolve, but frequently early pricing decisions are not revisited. We believe in an objective assessment of client needs, competitive positioning and product vision, all of which are assessed using a deeply analytical process, to inform pricing decisions. A structured pricing and packaging methodology creates the opportunity for different licensing, bundling and pricing strategies, which deliver incremental value to clients and more value to the business.
While excellence across all domains is important, having a strong product and a vision for how that product will deliver transformative capabilities to a business’ clients is something that we are passionate about. We have experience operating across the entire product lifecycle, from building new products and entering new markets, to scaling and driving product excellence. We work with management teams to clearly align on a product vision and build robust investment cases to support the product strategy.
The answer has changed in the software industry in the past 10 years, but there is no one-size-fits-all response. We have expertise in unpacking this question and assisting management teams in navigating the pros and cons of a different approach.
This enables us to make medium and long-term decisions to invest in real competitive advantage. We have a simple and clear methodology to ascribe value to each customer and to then measure profitability through the customer lifecycle.
From optimising the sales methodology, to structuring pipeline and performance management, measuring, assessing and unlocking Go-to-market teams’ capabilities has become increasingly structured and data driven. At Potentia we have a depth of expertise in designing, building and scaling high performing Go-to-market teams across a range of different sales models. We believe strongly in the transformative potential of high performing Go-to-market teams, and will work with our executives to ensure sales teams are structured for success.