At Crown, we believe in partnering with business managers who have proven records of success. Therefore, in selecting managers as or partners, we seek executives with a strategy to create value from operations. We seek managers who have not only broad educational backgrounds but also a wealth of industry experience.
Given the extraodinary diverse professional backgrounds of our executives, we can be helpful to our acquired companies in a variety of areas.
In sales and marketing, our contracts can introduce new sales opportunities and offer new marketing insights. In corporate finance, we can help with additional capital funding via private placements, borrowings, credit decisions and cash management.
In mergers and acquisitions, Crown can help find and negotiate with merger acquisition candidates.
In executive and professional selection, we can help with recruiting when the management team is incomplete. In instances where a company has needed management immediately, a Crown partner has stepped in as temporary executive until permanent management can come aboard.
In most cases, though, companies use the management team at Crown as a sounding board for the CEO. Building a company is often a lonely job; many chief executives appreciate a partner who has first-hand experience with whatever problem the entrepreneur is facing.
Management Incentives
We believe that appropriate management incentives are vital to the success of our companies. Typically they take the form of outright grants of equity, stock options or appreciation rights, earnouts and cash bonuses.
Continuity
For stand-alone acquisitions, we seek continuity after the transaction. In almost every case, our goal is to disrupt current operations as little as possible. So we retain the acquired company's management team and maintain it in its current facilities. The company also continues to operate under its current name.
Reporting Requirments
Crown partners work with a portfolio company's management to develop a reporting system that delivers timely and accruate financial information to ownership, management and our bankers and other funding sources.
We believe all of that information, including nonfinancial ones like market share, customer share, repeat business, customer satisfaction and product and service quality, should be available to the management team, board members, lenders and investors. And we help our companies deploy the technology they need to deliver the information required.
Intermediaries
We encourage inquiries from merger intermediaries like investment bankers, business and merger brokers, commercial bankers, finders and promoters, as well as CPAs, attorneys, management consultants and other interested third parties. We also welcome submissions from principals, incumbent management teams and controlling shareholders.
Fees and Response
Senior management makes our acquisition decisions, which translates into speedy responses to submissions; we generally indicate our degree of interest in a transaction within two weeks. We typically complete acquisitions within 120 days.