Consumer and Business Services
The greatest asset of any retail, consumer product, or business services company is its reputation and its perceived value among consumers. In today’s modern marketplace, consumers continue to rapidly shift loyalties and allegiances between concepts and brands. Within the large and diverse consumer and business services sectors, the potential power of brands to create value is a common theme.
With the urgency to develop a competitive advantage across the value chain, companies are being constrained in their ability to grow and maintain profit margins as a result of market saturation, growing competitive and economic pressures, increase in the number of alternative sales channels, and less loyal consumers.
Sectors include:
Consumer Goods & Electronics: Powerful brands capable of innovation, commanding and protecting attractive margins. Digital entertainment has been a significant contributor to the growth for retailers.
Hospitality, Sports and Leisure: This sector is large and diverse as transportation and travel services, sports and leisure are all market segments instructively linked together. Companies that benefit from increasing consumer demand and leisure spend, as well as other local activities and entertainment venues.
Outsourced Services: Services with highly skilled advisory activities and business processes as its core is driving the increasing prominence of outsourcing where successful operators use intellectual capital to build strong relationships, compelling brand positioning and rounded product offering.
Food & Drink: Business Models that recognize the increasing importance of health, food provenance and resource sustainability, which meet consumers’ growing demand for convenience and indulgence.
Transportation Services: In practically every country, the on-time movement of goods is crucial. In both the business and consumer markets, there is increasing pressure on businesses to outsource activities and on distribution companies to deliver items faster and cheaper.
Industrial Services: Support services such as oil & gas and utilities, often at the benefit of technology and facilities management where efficient operations are essential for hi-quality and profitable service delivery. Growth is driven by the need to maintain ageing assets in mature economies.
Specialist Distributors: The most successful distributors build strong, ongoing relationships with their clients in which they become integral partners to clients’ operations providing a unique vehicle for future growth. Those who adapt to clients’ needs will earn high returns in a market where ‘commoditized’ players face continuous pressure on margins.
Human Capital: Staffing, education, recruitment consulting and training businesses where developing and managing people are key and where growth and sustainability has been proven lucrative by leveraging outsourcing specialists.
Demand and consumer expectations continue to rise with increased development of a population desiring additional conveniences. Changing demographics and consumer expectations are forcing companies to find new ways to diversify, grow and penetrate new markets; and the massive pressure from online and large-scale retail companies has caused significant consolidation activity among specialty players.
Today, consumers around the world are concerned with how a company manufacturers its product and whether it is managing for continued sustainability through attention to economic, environmental, and social performance. Maintaining a bond with buyers is critical; but easily undermined if purchasers believe that companies are selling products unworthy of their reputations or made in a non-sustainable, non-environmentally friendly manner.
Be they direct marketers, established hospitality, or a fast-growing new service offering, our combined years of experience are brought to bear in the proper positioning of our clients story. We understand the industry dynamics and bring the right insight and execution to each individual transaction.
We look to sponsor buyout and growth businesses who have capitalized on the use of intellectual capital to build strong client loyalty, demonstrated excellence in manufacturing controls, compelling brand positioning, consistent strong design and rounded product and service offerings.
We stress the underlying fundamentals of purchasing, niche marketing, effective pricing and distribution models, and customer loyalty and disruptive-enabling technologies as key differentiation drivers.
In general, we do not like markets that are late to develop or require significant expenditure to educate the consumer to buy products or services that they don\'t know they need. Instead, we look for companies who have proven management and an established track record of investing across the services sector.