PEI Operating Partners Forum – New York 2022 Event Recap

On October 19th and 20th, 2022, our team had the opportunity to attend and sponsor the PEI Operating Partners Forum – New York 2022. It was PEI’s largest event to date with over 500 PE ops professionals in attendance, a testament to the growing ops function in private equity.

At the conference, our founder & CEO, Sean Mooney, hosted a panel titled, “Unlocking the Due Diligence Imperative to Rapidly Achieve the Value Creation Plan”. The panelists – Cici Zheng of ParkerGale Capital, Marc Jourlait of The Riverside Company, and Kalyan Mukherjee of Apollo Global Management – all shared insightful thoughts on this topic and we have captured some our key takeaways below:

Leveraging Diligence Streams to Inform Value Creation

• Overall, value creation plans are being created and put into place earlier in the process than has been done historically.
  • Benefits include building trust with the management teams and having the time and information upfront to formulate a more fully baked value creation plan.
• Ops teams find it critical to work with specialized groups for commercial due diligence that already know and understand the market.
• Areas assessed upfront in diligence to help ops teams better understand risk include human capital, technology, operations, and ESG.

Working with Deal Teams & Managing the Diligence Chaos

• Ops teams have discovered that working with deal teams from day 1 helps avoid any post-close surprises.
• Early work with the deal team helps the ops teams better understand what the deal team is underwriting for, allowing the ops team to better prioritize and position value creation plans.
• Many firms are leveraging technology to manage the many diligence processes that are happening at any given time.

We greatly enjoyed learning from these thought leaders and connecting with both familiar as well as new faces at the PEI Operating Partners Forum – New York 2022. You can learn about specific ways we equip PE operating professionals with the exact-fit, specialized third parties they need here. If you have an immediate need we can support, contact us here and we will immediately get started.