deal flow – HB thoughts

UBC Grad “Gets it”

I have been receiving a weekly newsletter from Sam Perera at Noverra Capital Partners which is – from what I can tell – a boutique investment bank with a small fund to make acquisitions with offices in Toronto and Vancouver. They look to be a cross between a Capital West and Yellow Point Equity Partners and despite having attempted to develop a bit of a network in both cities so far in my career – I would not have heard of them had I not been receiving the newsletter.

Sam’s Friday Finance Weekly offers a bit of candid conversation around what’s going on in the world of finance. He typically discusses the facts around a few stories that had been in the news that week, provides his own take on the issue, and then finishes with a touch of humour. I find most of his posts interesting and witty, even though he seems to have a soft spot for weaving Lindsay Lohan or Kim Kardashian into the storyline a bit often. Bottom line however is that I take the 4-5 minutes each week to read them and as a result, Noverra is a top-of-mind firm for me in this space.

What I don’t understand is why these newsletters are not featured on the Noverra website. They have obviously been signed off on by a partner in the firm – so why not have them posted publicly? Looks to me like some in the firm still view the website as a one-way communicator and not the appropriate place to be generating two-way conversation. Most of what I have been reading and learning over the last 15 months when it comes to online marketing strategies tells me that the online billboard website is going (albeit slowly) the way of the dodo bird.

Interesting tidbit – Sam is a Sauder MBA grad. My gut tells me he took Paul Cubbon’s internet marketing course before graduating…

The Virtual Handshake

Found a great slideshare contributor in David Teten who is the managing partner of VC firm ff Venture Partners and co-author of “The Virtual Handshake: Opening doors and closing deals online”. Looks to be a great source of information and insight on the online trends with respect to VC/PE investing….

… but I digress. David also maintains a blog where there is a great interview he did with PE firm MCM Capital about how private equity firms use social media to build grow their pipeline and source capital. MCM has incorporated Facebook, LinkedIn, an RSS feed, and a weekly blog into its website to a number of ends. They ask themselves 2 questions when creating content; how does it help the firm and how does it improve the likelihood that someone will find them. MCM has also targeted a top 100 rank for select search terms which may sound good, but as empirical evidence shows, not landing on the first page of results on a search is disastrous for your web traffic. My sense is that a goal for any firm should either be top 10 or bust.

The interview presents real data around website traffic and page views – both of which increased however this is not really a good metric for ‘helping the firm’ – but the stat that really jumped out at me was that their deal flow had increased by 150% in 6 months since implementing these strategies. Deal flow is the lifeblood of any good VC/PE firm and leveraging online strategies to widen the funnel for potential deals sounds like

There is a clear link here between building the investment opportunity pipeline and “widening the funnel” of potential customers as is commonly discussed in a marketing course. The interesting difference in this case is that the funnel for a VC/PE firm actually refers to its products (target acquisitions) and not its customers (which in the traditional sense would be the LPs). I wonder if there are other business models that would benefit from a widening funnel on the product side?