Sean Mooney

DIVE BLOG 

Insights from the world of private equity, strategic consulting, and business intelligence.

Avoid These Common Mistakes When Preparing Your Company for Sale

After a nearly 20-year career in private equity, I’ve learned to appreciate that it takes just as much work to effectively sell a company as it does to excellently buy a company. It’s also easy to slip up or not pay enough attention to vital steps that could profoundly change the final price upon sale. Sellers make a number of common mistakes during sale processes, including a lack of advance preparation, not knowing key questions about themselves, and not appropriately resourcing the business...
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PE Firms, Prep For Sale, CEOs

Riveter Capital: Championing Women and Minority-Owned Businesses in PE

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in the private equity industry understands how difficult it is to “disrupt” the space. This has less to do with a lack of desire and more to do with the heaviness of the lift: being an innovator or a market leader is not for the faint of heart. But as we are discovering, after a year that rocked the globe and upended many aspects of our lives, now is the time to make strides and truly challenge the status quo. For Colleen Gurda and her partner...
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PE Firms

Maximize Value: Top 8 Practices for Preparing Your Business for Sale

In today’s competitive markets, private equity companies and their partners are being forced to pay record-high prices for investments in companies. To generate attractive returns, the private equity companies and their managers must create substantial value after closing. One effective way to create value is by running a highly prepared, efficient, and focused sales process. Here are eight best practices for preparing a company for a value-maximizing sale: Run fast Time is the enemy of any...
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PE Firms, Prep For Sale, Deal Team

Insights from TCV's Susan Clark: Operational Excellence in Private Equity

Susan Clark is an insightful force who spent nearly a decade in Dell operations prior to getting bit with the private equity bug. While watching Silver Lake Partners lead the privatization of Dell, a publicly-traded, end-to-end technology solutions company, Clark recalls: “After observing the transformation process, I basically decided I wanted to be on the other side of the table. I was good at fixing things, making operational decisions to increase efficiency, and I knew I could take my...
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PE Firms

Insights from LaSalle Capital's Kelly Cornelis on Private Equity Trends

As the daughter of a retired sportscaster, Kelly Cornelis had little knowledge of the finance world growing up on the outskirts of Chicago. She entered college at Notre Dame as an English major and stayed there until her sophomore year—when one of her professors noticed her proclivity for math and suggested she enroll in some business courses. “I was immediately drawn to the analytical aspects of finance,” she recalls. This led her to an investment management class, where she had the...
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PE Firms, Operations

Private Equity Insights: Leadership and Growth Strategies for 2021

BluWave works with over 500 private equity funds from around the globe, connecting them with pre-vetted, best-in-class, interim executives and small groups across a variety of resource and functional areas. From information technology and manufacturing to healthcare and consumer goods, our clients are paving the way for “Industry 4.0.” In other words, they have their heads in the game and their hands on the pulse of news you can use. Check out the latest, curated collection of reports,...
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PE Firms

Building Resilience: Strategies for Thriving in Changing Times

Do you have a resilient company? Does it navigate shifting tides easily, or do your leaders and teams struggle with every minor disruption? What makes certain people better equipped to roll with the punches? According to bestselling author and ADP Researcher Marcus Buckingham: “people don’t fear change, they fear the unknown.” To use a timely example, if your company is attempting to rush back to “normal” (going into a physical office, business travel, etc.) he suggests having a concrete plan...
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PE Firms, CEOs

Inside MiddleGround Capital: Lauren Mulholland on Private Equity Innovation

What happens when a former New York investment banker and mother of two young children (with a third not far behind) decides to take a “measured risk?” First, she teams up with long-time colleagues John Stewart (no, not this one, this one) and Scot Duncan in Lexington, Kentucky; next, together they decide to build a franchise focused squarely on the middle market; and, certainly not last, in under three years they grow their private equity firm to a team of nearly 40 individuals, raise capital...
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PE Firms

Kyle Johnson Joins BluWave as Head of Growth Marketing

This week, we announced the addition of Kyle Johnson to our leadership team as head of growth marketing. This key hire is a vital move for our company, as we continue to expand during Covid-19 while supporting business agility and economic recovery. Johnson, who is known in industry circles as a “marketing operations game-changer,” spent the past 12 years of his career in New York City where he worked at both Fortune 500 companies as well as VC-backed startups to build and optimize various...
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5 Simple Hacks to Balance Personal and Professional Life

One of the silver linings of 2020 was my increased focus on (and confidence in) protecting my time. Spare moments were few and far between, as I, like so many parents in similar circumstances, attempted to walk the fine virtual line between my personal and professional life. A few weeks ago, BluWave spoke with a group of women in private equity to “knowledge share” and provide a space of support as we continue to navigate the “next normal.” While the conversation was filled with enlightening...
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How to thrive with your lenders in 2021

As we roll up our sleeves and move full steam ahead into 2021, it is clear that many of the challenges of last year linger. In fact, many companies—particularly in the travel and hospitality sectors—still face unprecedented circumstances and continue to scramble from one problem to the next. This can often mean losing sight of long-term goals, and when it comes to your lenders and liquidity can quickly lead to major, even irrevocable, problems. This is why companies should continue to...
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PE Firms

With the long view, PE firms make steady partners through the ups and downs

When people think of the private equity (PE) industry, they often picture big Wall Street firms launching headline-grabbing takeovers of multi-billion-dollar companies. But this is a caricatured version of what PE firms actually do: forge long-term relationships with companies of all sizes across industries to help them scale and build value sustainably. In fact, according to the American Investment Council (AIC) more than 30,000 American companies (which employ 8.8 million workers and account...
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PE Firms

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