Operating Competencies
Birchwood’s operating competencies enable clear, consistent, and effective communication between our management partners and our principals, while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Birchwood assists its management teams in driving value creation by employing a proven operating process focused on accelerating the achievement of a strategic plan with key milestones.
We begin with active, strategic involvement at the board level, while leveraging our expertise, resources and core competencies. Birchwood’s operating process is flexible and adaptable to the portfolio company, all the while, adhering to our comprehensive framework.
- Develop a comprehensive value-oriented framework that translates the investment thesis into results, including strategic plan development, key value drivers, key enablers (people, processes and systems) and timelines.
- Optimize cost structure and improve margins. Focus on reducing non-value-added processes, simplify core processes, track KPI’s vs. goals and optimize high-value-added methodologies for competitiveness.
- Develop performance culture using our 5 principles: hire good managers who act like owners, define the 3-5-year investment thesis, make capital work hard, measure only what drives value and create shared incentives around active shareholders. Establish independent boards and upgrade financial systems and controls.
- Accelerate growth via pricing strategies, customer analytics and clustering, loyalty, salesforce effectiveness and more. Identify new growth areas through product profitability and strategic accretive acquisitions, geographical and vertical expansion.
- Improving working capital by accelerating cash / inventory management, collections, extended payment terms, CAPEX management and optimizing the capital structure. Also consider asset sales and leasebacks.
- Leverage Birchwood’s expertise for post-merger integration, synergy capture,and optimization of capital structure to support growth.