Grasping the opportunity
If the truth be told, many marketers are enjoying the experience of
competing in a downturn - including those at corporate finance
advisors Catalyst.They tell pm how life got too easy in their neck
of the woods and why they relish the current challenges.
"It's going to be a tougher 12 months," says Andy Currie,
managing partner of UK-based Catalyst Corporate
Finance, talking about 2009. "But in our industry it's
almost been a little bit too easy.There are a lot of people
who have got a little bit lazy and don't really know what they are
doing."
Catalyst - through its five partners, 35 staff and three UK offices -
advises both buyers and sellers on medium-sized mergers and
acquisitions. If there is any profession that represents boom and
bust, it is this one. In some sectors, activity trebled between 2006
and 2007, only to shrink 70 per cent in 2008, according to
accountant Grant Thornton.
But Catalyst - from its London, Nottingham and Birmingham
offices - is confident that it is going to have a good recession.
"We've been growing at between 10 to 20 per cent pa over the last
couple of years," says business development director Clive Bawden
(although the firm does not release its turnover figures)."We anticipate
that continuing despite the downturn."
What gives the firm the confidence to say this is its habit of taking
a long-term view. "I am really more interested in where we are in five or ten years time than in the next two to three months," says
Currie.The business - founded in the Midlands ten years ago - has
always played a long marketing game. Currie is used to having business
relationships which run for "two, three, four, it could be seven
years" before he is instructed to advise.What is important to him is
to get into dialogue with chief executives and other players rather
than to be asked to act for them tomorrow.
The arrival of chartered accountant and chartered marketer Clive
Bawden three years ago to set up a marketing function developed
the marketing approach that Currie and co had instinctively developed
before then. So nowadays, as ever, the firm's research department
studies particular sectors in detail - the healthcare market, for
instance. It will then produce a document - anything from a letter to
a full-blown sector report - and send it out to potentially interested
parties.What changed after Bawden's appointment was not only a
more channel led, strategic approach but also the start of some
basic segmented marketing. Nowadays, they send different kinds of
communications to different groups - public companies, private
companies, intermediaries and management teams, for example.
This segmented approach will play out in spades during the changed circumstances of a recession. While a year ago, sellers of
businesses were Catalyst's clients in about 60 per cent of transactions,
they will probably represent only about 30 per cent in 2009.
As Currie explains, there will be an M&A market - but it will be a
buyer's market, not the sales market of the last few years. He says: "If
you didn't have to, you probably wouldn't sell a business in the next
12 months - because the valuations aren't going to be there." So
Currie and Bawden expect to be focusing their efforts much more
on communicating with buyers looking for opportunities - such as
agile management teams who would like to buy out the businesses they work in.
Getting the communication right to potential clients can pay out
big dividends."We have learnt over the last 12 months that the
more specific we are in our sector knowledge, the more return we
get for our marketing buck," says Currie. So a detailed piece of
research highlighting the growth of NHS contracts for the private
sector in the next two years is likely to produce a much better
response than a general letter about M&A opportunities in the UK.
Bawden has been surprised about how some other professionals and the media have responded to the economic crisis - rushing out
into print and spreading anxiety in response to the credit crunch
and downturn."We have continued doing what we are good at,
holding back from a panic reaction," he says. "And things are
changing so quickly that, by the time you have printed something, it
is out of date."The firm has concentrated far more on face-to-face
meetings and networking, sensing a need among contacts for actual
conversation and sharing of collective experience, he says.
When Bawden joined three years ago, there was a marketing
regime in place but it was rather 'basic', he says - "a website, a
magazine and the odd press release". Since then he has assembled
the basic marketing infrastructure, clarified and opened up the channels
to market and begun generating the contents of the marketing
message. And he has also worked hard to outstrip the expectations
that his colleagues had of him. "Nobody in this business thought that
we could bring in a client through marketing alone - but we've
done that," he says. An article that was written on 'strategic option
reviews' for a new series of pamphlets (Five Minutes with Catalyst)
"generated several enquiries, one of which will turn into a multimillion
pound piece of work," he says.
Bawden is from the straight-talking school of marketing. And even
in an interview like the one for this article, he prefers to talk about
results than the details behind them. So while he volunteers his
views on being a profit centre, he has to have extracted from him
information about how he puts procedures in place. He accepts that
the partners do not expect him to cover the marketing team's costs
in this way, but he says:"We have to be a profit centre, not a cost
centre. I believe I've got to deliver a result on that."
Catalyst's International work has been steadily growing during
Bawden's time with the firm, and given his own international experience
(living and working in Greece and Australia amongst other
things), it is an area he is sure will grow.While Catalyst has no ambition
to expand overseas through offices abroad, it belongs instead
to a 20-firm international network, Mergers Alliance, through which
it has done work with Chinese, Indian and many other partner firms
across the globe.Through this, Catalyst has been involved in various
international conferences in 2008 - a food and drink sector seminar
in Holland, an investment conference in India, and a conference
recently in America on global M&A - and Bawden is increasingly
involved in finding speakers and delegates, as well as liaising with his
international partners on cross marketing opportunities and ideas.
Nearer to home, he sees the legal sector as an area in coming
years that Catalyst could work in when law firms start to merge and
be taken over by businesses, under the Clementi reforms, and he
sees opportunity for those in the sector. "Professional services
marketing still does labour under some old and outdated misconceptions
about the value it generates, and to be fair some of it is still
quite frighteningly bad," he says."However marketing in the sector
will have to change still further in the next couple of years as new
brands and business models take shape, particularly as a result of
Clementi, and for those commercial marketers out there there
should be some fantastic opportunities ahead to generate tangible
value and progress your career."
Despite the recessionary talk surrounding the UK, Bawden and
Currie are quite open about the opportunities facing them."Some
of our competitors are going to struggle," says Bawden. And Currie
says: "In a downturn, some people put their heads in their hands -
and others say: 'There's an opportunity here, let's grasp it.'We're in
the latter group."