The Private Equity Toolkit. Tamara Sakovska

of your fund may be, the point of this discussion is to encourage you to keep up to date with the fluid landscape of business development best practices in the private equity industry in order to stay ahead of your competition.

Good news! We have now reached the end of the DATABASE Roadmap™. You're probably wondering who on Earth has time to go through every step described in the framework? I get asked this question often and the honest answer is nobody. But if nobody really does the whole thing, what is the point of considering every step? Here is what I think. The goal you should set for yourself is to do more than your direct competitors and at all times aim to be a few steps ahead of them. The objective of your job is to find practical ways to attain a competitive advantage. It can mean different things in practice. If you, like most of us, operate in a fiercely competitive private equity market, your best bet is to learn what best practices look like and incorporate as many of them as possible in your day-to-day deal sourcing activities in order to derive maximum benefit from your opportunistic deal sourcing process.

Notes

      1 1 DATABASE Roadmap™ is a registered trademark of my company, Lavra Group Limited.

      2 2 Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet protocol for computer networks, stated that the usefulness of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

      3 3 The effect is strong for acquisitions of private companies but not for public-to-private transactions. This appears to make sense because private companies generally have more control over the choice of their acquirer.

      4 4 True as of March 2019.