In the latest episode of the Private Equity Funcast, Operating Partners Cici Zheng and Paul Stansik discuss the ICP - Ideal Customer Profile. As investors, we're frequently asking our portfolio companies - who is your ICP? Which ones are your best-fit customers, the ones that your product is truly the best fit for to solve their pain points? How do we avoid trying to be the dreaded "swiss-army knife" and being everything to everybody? In this episode we discuss why defining an ICP is important to us and our 3 step process for building out an ICP. 

Jimmy is joined by David Cohen, Human Capital Partner at Kelso and Company. David has been working in the Human Capital / Private Equity space for over a decade and has helped shape the discipline across the PE industry. They break down the various ways that human capital can impact a portfolio business, including alignment to strategy, leadership effectiveness, talent acquisition, and org design. If there’s a word that defines today’s episode, it’s alignment. It is at the center of how both Kelso and ParkerGale think about the human capital practice. To be successful, leadership need to get dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people organized around a common purpose and strategy. If you can’t do that, not much else matters.

In this episode, Jimmy is joined by Laura Queen, founder, and CEO of 29Bison, a Human Capital Consultancy focused on the PE space. Laura is also the author of the book “People Economics: Defining and Measuring the True Value of Human Capital” and is a genius at understanding how strategic human capital management contributes to the value creation process. They break down Human Capital Due Diligence – what it is, how it’s done, and why it’s the fastest-growing of all the diligence workstreams.

Jim talks all things DevOps with Dave Mangot from Mangoteque.  Dave's philosophy is "Get Good at Delivering Software", and he has helped many well-known companies become "best in class"  We discuss the four keys that define a company's competence in software delivery; deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to recovery.  There's also a heated discussion about whether "the cloud" is cheaper than running your own data center.

No prospect is going to buy enterprise software on impulse.  Prospects don't need advertising, they need help, help understanding that they have a problem, help in understanding their options for solving that problem, and help in working their way through an evaluation and choosing a solution.  Paul Stansik talks with Marcus Sheridan, author of "They Ask, You Answer" about these topics and more.

Your company acquired another company - congrats! But what happens next? In this episode, Operating Partners Cici and Jimmy break down the Integration Management Office, or IMO. They discuss what it is and how they deploy it inside the portfolio to integrate recently acquired businesses into their acquiring entity. They discuss how they stand up the process, the key processes that need to be in place to make sure everything gets done, and how to make sure you don’t forget about the humans involved in the process. 

Jimmy is joined on the show by Ted Bililies, Managing Director at AlixPartners, for what is now becoming a yearly ritual to discuss the results of the 7th Annual PE Leadership Survey. This year, the theme is all about the COVID-driven acceleration of trends that is propelling human capital to the forefront of the value creation agenda. They discuss the great resignation, how CEOs are now more fearful for their jobs than ever, and the rising important of talent recruiting, engagement, development, and retention. They close with tips to help leaders and investors better manage in a world that is only become more and more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. 

On this episode of the Funcast, Operating Partner Paul Stansik is joined by CEO Elias Rubel, whose team at Matter Made works with B2B marketing teams big and small to help accelerate their revenue growth. If you've ever wondered how to organize a marketing team, the right way to interview a marketing leader, the foundation you need in place to launch an effective demand generation campaign, or what leaders of companies like Loom, G2, Dropbox, and other unicorns are doing to tune their inbound lead machines, this one is for you. 

It's the grand finale of our annual March Madness episodes -- the final four.  Cass versus Jimmy and Paul versus Cici for all the proverbial marbles for our favorite podcast!

It's our annual March Madness show.  This year our intrepid Operations Team picks their 16 favorite podcasts.   Have a listen as Cici, Paul, Cass, and Jimmy along with Commissioner for Life -- Jim work their way down to a final four.  And play along at home with our survey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FMP6J8V   The final four battle it out for supremacy on next Monday's episode.

Sometimes the recipe for a good discussion is to simply pick an important topic, invite two smart people who disagree with each other, and then sit back and listen. Today Paul Stansik, Operating Partner at ParkerGale, is joined by Cory Bray (MD at ClozeLoop) and Nelson Gilliat (Author of Death of the SDR: And the Birth of Buyer Centric Revenue) to talk about how to get prospecting and growth right. In the course of a rousing hourlong debate, Paul, Cory, and Nelson cover the spectrum of opinions on “how to prospect well”, the evolving role of the BDR/SDR, and where sales and marketing teams should focus to maximize their chances for success.

Jim and Attorney Peter Halprin from Pasich, LLP discuss the ins and outs of Cybersecurity Insurance and Litigation. We cover a wide range of topics with a focus on what private equity leaders need to know about these issues, including: why private equity leaders should treat attacks as inevitabilities, how cyber insurance can provide breach response support and financial protection against cyber risks, and how companies may be able to find coverage under other policies for cyberattacks, including crime, kidnap and ransom, property, and technology errors and omissions.

In this episode, Cici Zheng talks with April Dunford, a positioning consultant, speaker, and author on how she helps growth stage companies with positioning. They discuss the difference between product messaging and product positioning, how to "fix" positioning problems, and why founders, PE firms, and portfolio companies should even care about positioning in the first place.

In this week's episode, we are talking with Pam Lang, CEO of Xcelerated Data, a company that focuses on fixing data quality problems leading to better decisions in your marketing organization.   Pam explains compiled lists, hotlists, the differences between consumer lists and business lists, and SIC codes versus NAICS codes.  

Jim, Cici and Jimmy discuss community building within our portfolio. We cover everything from organizing small teams across our companies to ParkerGale's approach to "summits".

It's our annual predictions show for 2022 with your original hosts, Devin and Jim. With the glut of other pontificators doing their usual prognostications, we've decided to shake things up a bit
and focus on resolutions, or rather our anti-resolutions.