Name: PE fund: can you trust your PortCo management teams?
Uploaded: 2026-09-22T16:16:12.807Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 16 s
Description: PE fund: can you trust your PortCo management teams?

Transcript for "PE fund: can you trust your PortCo management teams?": Good afternoon, everyone. Hi. Welcome. Hi, Jeremy. Hi, David. Good to have you both with us. How are we doing? Good. Very good. for the. Looking forward to it. I'll give it a couple minutes before we start so that everyone can join. I see we already have a couple who have joined in. We should have another strong crowd today just like last time, as this topic has generated a lot of interest with... Within our kind of CFO community. So love to see that. Thank you. For anyone joining now, welcome. Drop where you're calling from in the chat. It's always always good to see the spread of callers and and and where you guys are based. And, yeah, we'll give a couple of minutes, and then we will kick things off. Alright. We'll give it a couple more seconds. Okay. Alright. Let's get going. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining, here with us today for another, session. Today's session will cover something that we obviously hope will resonate with most people in this room. Whether you're already PE backed or looking to become potentially PE backed in the near future, this session will cover what it actually takes for a PE fund to trust the team running its portfolio company, and this obviously wouldn't be possible without the help of our two speakers today, Jeremy and David. By the end of the hour, you'll have a... You'll have heard a real case study alongside how Agicap helps kind of bridge that gap when it comes to providing real time visibility on your cash. If you do have some questions throughout the session, we will obviously be having a q and a part at the end, last ten minutes, so please don't be shy. Feel free to ask as many questions as you want to both of our guest, speakers today. Before we start, this is obviously a virtual event. But should these topics, as I said, resonate with you and should you be in and around the London area on the October 15, we will be hosting our in person event. It's an evening built for CFOs, treasurers, and finance leaders at mid market companies. It's it's held at the Lord's Cricket Ground. I'm sure our cricket friends out here will know very well where that is. For those who are, too interested in cricket like myself, it's a certain throw away from Regent's Park, so it's it's right in the center of of London. I've left the QR code here on the right to, scan and sign up, and my colleague Yasmin has now... Just now added the link in the chat as well if that is easier. Places are limited. So if you are interested, I recommend signing up as soon as possible, and we hope to see as many of you there, on the fifteenth. And let's introduce today's speakers. I'll let them obviously introduce themselves. But before I do that, set the scene. Jeremy Earnshaw is joining us again. Great to have you back, Jeremy. He's a six time CFO, now a coach, and Ned with over twenty five years of C level experience. He's seen a lot and has a lot of war stories as he likes to call them, to share with us. Jeremy, over Thanks, Francesco. Yep. Good afternoon. Good morning to everybody. As Francesco mentioned, hopefully, quite a lot of relevant. experience on bringing a few of the theoretical issues to life in the course of the next fifty or sixty minutes or so. Thank you, Jeremy. And alongside him, making what I think is his debut for edge cap, doctor David Cooper. David Cooper is a founding partner at Cooper Limon Limited who advises PE, investors on leadership capability. David, I'll also leave the floor to you. Hi, everybody. Yeah. So I've been working in PE for thirty years this year. Originally, I was an accountant. I started work with Jeremy nearly forty years ago. But after a few years, I saw Stenson retrained as a psychologist. So I'm really interested in the sort of behavioral and leadership side of, private equity. That's that's what I'm gonna be talking about this afternoon. Excellent. Thank you, David. And then finally, you have myself. I'll be your moderator for today. I always say that my background isn't quite as impressive as our speakers and can confirm once again, unfortunately, that is the case. Quick intro on my side, I've been with Agicap for just under five years now, and I'm currently the sales team lead, here in Agicap UK. I mentioned that we're covering after the the discussion of the roundtable how Agicap is bridging that gap. For those who are joining us for the first time, welcome, obviously. And just to give a bit of an intro, Agicap is the number one global next gen TMS for mid market companies. It's a French company founded in 2016, and in the past decade, we've raised over a €180,000,000 in funding. A big part of this was invested in expanding within Europe and most recently into The US. I'm fortunate enough to say that I have over 600 colleagues spread across 12 offices, and we serve over 8,000 clients spread across the world. So that covers the who we are. Let's cover really quickly the... What we do. We're a modular treasury management system with banking and ERP connectivity at the core of everything we do. We then have these four modules, which are wrapped around it. You have the first one, top left, which is cash management. That focused on the short term. What we do is we'll connect to your ERP and retrieve all of your invoices and build a thirteen week forecast. This gives clients, obviously, real time visibility to their cash balance per entity and bank in the upcoming weeks. You then have cash flow planning on the top right. This focus on the long term. So we're talking about generally a six to twelve to even eighteen month forecast by integrating generally your P and L forecast, and this is where you can do some scenario planning and variance analysis. And then you have the AP automation bottom left hand side. This is streamlining your supplier invoices from the procurement all the way to the payment phase. And then lastly, the accounts receivable automation, bottom right hand side. This analyzes your client behavior and automates the dunning process. Again, in the second half of this session, I'll take no longer than ten minutes just to do a quick overview of how Agicap can help those portfolio companies and PE funds when it comes to managing their cash. And I'll be focusing, just for reference, on the banking and ERP connectivity, cash management, and debt management modules for that session. Without further ado, I'll say let's get into it, and let's start. We have a good turnout, so I think we are ready to go. Jeremy, let's start with you. Take us back to when you joined that highly geared PE backed secondary buyout. What did you find when you got there? Thanks, Francesco. And, I'll I'll just spend a little bit of time actually setting the scene. Because what I think this case study does is it highlights any number of issues, which I'm really interested to see what Dr. David has to say on it from, his perspective. My perspective was that I did, as Francesco has described there, join a secondary management bio entity approximately eight weeks after the deal had been transacted. So I joined a £75,000,000 transaction business, on a secondary buyout where the original management team was exiting at this stage of the transaction. So a brand new management team or rather should say a brand new ownership management team was stepping into the shoes of the leadership of the organization. I'll and I will give you some numbers because I think they frame the discussion. And my background, as Francesco said, is cuts across a number of CFO roles, including two VC backed entities and and the PE entity as well. And I think the the framework is really important. So the buyout was £75,000,000, and it had 50,000,000 of, senior debt at very high rates plus £20,000,000 of preference shares, which had a 20% interest rate coupon on a cumulative roll up basis. And I can probably imagine one or two, eyebrows already raised at the rates that were being charged. And I think that highlights some of the time challenges in private equity organizations. Here's what I inherited eight weeks into the deal, as of the new CFO with the original CFO exiting the deal. I inherited, very little in terms of management led information. What I did inherit was unbelievably complicated models written by the investor for the benefit of the investor. And to be to be honest, the only real entry point for the management was an outcome. The outcome that said, if everything goes really, really well, you'll be you'll receive a capital gain in approximately three to three and a half years. In terms of the input into that very complicated Excel based model, there was very little from the management team. So they had their eyes potentially just on the prize of an outcome in three to three and a half years. So the question that I had to ask myself was, does this actually make sense? So you arrive in a an organization, and this had been a competitive transactional process for quite some time to get to the stage where the PE company, who is a very reputable PE company, said, yes. We're prepared to pay £75,000,000 for this deal. So I joined the company, and I had the rather interesting, opportunity within three weeks of joining the company to say, can we all stop giving ourselves a bit of a round of applause here and a pat on the back at how well we're all doing? Because quite frankly, I think we're gonna breach our banking covenants in fifteen months' time. So this, as you can imagine, was not exactly well received in terms of news and information where, the the young man called Jeremy Earnshaw turns up and says, I think you've got your numbers wrong over the course of three weeks from joining. But, unfortunately, that was the case. And I think the challenges when you ask yourself is that we had an undercooked leadership team, very capable executives, but as a leadership team entering into a management buyout situation, very little experience. It was a model that was built by the investor for the benefit of the investor. I also inherited a very defined time scale. Let's go back to that £20,000,000 worth of preference shares at 20%. Of the people on the call, I'm sure we can all probably do the math, but if that's rolling up at 20% per annum on a cumulative basis, you are increasing the level of debt within the organization by a big number every year. So 4,000,000 the first year, 6,000,000 the second year, another 7 to 7,500,000 in year three. And all this has gotta be found by the equity stake that you're increasing, hopefully, in terms of value. So the challenge was we've given ourselves a very complex model with very little ownership by the management team to get there. So when you started digging into the assumptions within the model, they weren't necessarily the management's assumptions. They'd effectively been given a model to work with, and therefore, the originality and the source information was not as good as it could have been. And the original information that you needed for a CFO basis, I myself and the rest of the management team was pretty much absent. So what didn't we have? We didn't have a thirteen week cash flow. We didn't have a six month cash flow. We didn't really have a twelve month cash flow. We were working on an investor led model with very little headroom on banking covenants. Going back to the, the the challenge that we faced, what it did do actually is it enable the management team to relook at the assumptions going forward and take a little bit more ownership of the forecasting of the business. And what it demonstrated was a very, very thinly capitalized organization with very little headroom on covenants and an almost immediate renegotiation with the banks of the covenants. And for one thing in the private equity world, if you are able to at least signpost the bad news, you can actually gain some credibility from doing that. And to be fair to the management team, they relooked at the information. It wasn't an easy discussion, but what they were able to do was at least forecast the bad news well ahead of time. So we had a problem in terms of the information not being originated by management. We had a problem with the information being developed by the investor, and we had a good news story. We also have some challenges within the revenues. And, again, for people who worked in private equity, venture capital, and any organization, recurring revenues are very, very important. And the one of the key assumptions within the model was that new business would come in at a very aggressive rate. And you have to ask yourself as a new CFO, are our competitors about to just allow us to walk into their business and effectively steal extra market share without a challenge? And the answer to that is, no. They weren't. So on that basis, we had to reconstitute a model and actually redig into the source of that information. And so the challenges from a management team were this was right at the start of a process. It was a new management team, and it was an ownership management team, which to a certain extent really haven't got hugely involved in the transaction itself. If you were to kinda create those circumstances in a theoretical case study, you might think it might be too much in terms of putting the problems into that case study. But it's a real life example, and those were some of the challenges that we face. So setting the scene is, really important for the basis of how did we take it forward from there in terms of a management team, which had, to a certain extent, already started off on the back foot. Francesco. Thank you, Jeremy, for that. I think what you said really kind of also resonate on my side as well and sounded a bit like a deja vu in the sense that I've obviously spoken with a lot of CFOs, especially fractional CFOs coming into these new businesses, these feedbacks companies, and just noticing this massive misalignment between, whether it be a decentralized finance team or decentralized leadership team, and they're just struggling in terms of making sure those numbers... That they're aligned on those numbers. So to everything, that's a very interesting example that that you had and and and and a and a good reference to to those war stories that we spoke about before. I'm just adding here in the chat for who has joined us today. I hope you can see it. To... I think it should have loaded. So, yeah, to to let us know if if if anyone here has had a similar surprise when it comes to cash visibility or covenants in, in the past couple months or weeks when when when they've been in this... In a new world, essentially. Moving on to Dr. David Cooper, from what you kind of heard on Jeremy Earnshaw point of view, does that sound familiar from what you've seen across other portfolios? What... And, I guess, yeah, to go a bit more into detail, what's actually going on when something like that happens? Well, it it it is familiar. I mean, I I do think it's quite an extreme case that Jeremy Earnshaw was in. The thing that strikes me from the psychological side is a very common pattern. It's when the numbers go wrong, we tend to blame the person rather than the plan rather than the system. And this is something I've seen a lot in private equity. It's called the, fundamental attribution error. You're getting bad news. You tend to look for something associated with the individual and kind of overlook the context. Jeremy Earnshaw's example, it was all to do with the surrounding context. You know, he came in, you know, eight weeks in. He inherited this shocking cash flow system, a sort of under equipped leadership team, and like, a sound of a hopelessly overoptimistic plan. None of that had anything to do with him. And the issue is what I often see in practice in this situation like this, if the PE firm decides to blame the CFO, mistrust the CFO, and we're talking about trust, it then build it can build up a cycle of blame and defensiveness. So what happens over time is that the investor will find more and more evidence that he's dealing with an incompetent CFO. So it's confirmation bias, then the CFO, if you're not careful, will spend more and more of their time proving that they're competent, and it's not really their fault. So more and more energy and attention goes into proving that it's not your fault. Meanwhile, the root cause is kind of festering away in in the background. I I I remember watching a presentation from Robert Keegan, who's a a professor at Harvard, And he was talking about this problem of defending yourself, and he calls it the the second job that nobody pays for. And in some situations, you can find leaders directing 30% of their energy and attention just to sort of proving that they're not too late. And that's to say in the background, you're not really addressing the root cause. And this is you know, I call this the syndrome of avoidable value leakage because it is avoidable. If. I I think... just add if I can just add. there, David, I think just to give you, again, a bit more con context is everything in this, is that we would we we were dealing with, competent private equity executives, and competent management executives as well. So this wasn't a situation where there was an immediate worry expressed around the transaction. I think to a certain extent, you could argue that people got a little bit carried away with the valuation and how good the strength of the revenue, recognition was and how defensible that was. But I think if I if I take David's point, I appreciate David's, line was breaking up a little bit. If you take the reaction that that I had, I I I thought I was actually given somewhat of a generous ride, in the first instance, perhaps because I was brand new and joining eight weeks after the transaction had been executed. And that's almost like the, the emperor's new clothes, I suppose, in coming in and saying, I I really wonder what's happening here. And it it allowed you to express views with a certain degree of a shield around you that said, well, we just hired this guy, so he's probably okay. As opposed to I think what David was saying was, if things begin to go wrong maybe eighteen months down the line, there's an immediate potential reaction to, well, how does that affect our exit for a start? We were, of course, eight weeks into a deal. Although there is an eye on an exit at some stage, it's a long way in the future. So what we had the benefit of was time, and we were able to utilize a little bit of that time to, I suppose, dissuade some of what Dr. David was saying, which was it has to be the it has to be the fault of somebody as opposed to the real issue, which was why don't we go back and have a look at this 50 megabyte spreadsheet that virtually nobody other than the private equity executives really understands where it came from. And I think that was, from what Dr. David said, that was the root cause. And the root cause was overoptimism in the model, which was being prepared almost on a remote basis from the actual management team. So there wasn't as much buy in, and and and maybe that's something which, we were able to, to address in the early days. I mean, let's let's cut to the chase. What actually happened? I can hear a few people saying, well, maybe I'll I'll I'll I'll wait for that and and and keep the conclusion for another couple of questions, hence. Thanks, Jeremy. Yeah. I think I think as you said, I think it's, also what Dr. David said as well. That kind of interesting to to hear about that negative downward spiral being, I guess, ignited by financing spending more time, arguing or questioning the numbers rather than actually improving the business and working on those numbers and and and driving actual insights from it. And then I guess it would be interesting to understand this is an open question to both of you. I don't know who wants to maybe, start, and, yeah, take take command on this. What actually then breaks that cycle, and what would you, I guess, both want to see if it... From different opinions in that business instead? Can can Anybody, do you wanna take that first? I well, I can't can't you hear me alright. I'm sorry if my, my signal is breaking up with it. Does that does that sound. okay? Yeah. It it comes and goes. I think it's, yeah, it's just a bit of a... The signal kind of comes and goes a bit, but we can... It's a bit cracky, but but we can still hear you. Sorry, folks. I'll do the best I can. So there is one principle. I think a rule of thumb in private equity, which is doubt before you sign. But once you've done the deal, you really have to trust. You're in it together with the with the management team. And there is a fundamental difference between doing due diligence of the business that you might invest in and testing the numbers, but you have to accept that when you've done the deal, you're sort of in bed with everybody. And there's no point behaving as though you're still doing, you know, going through a sort of testing due diligence process. When I'm advising PE firms, I always talk about the three t's when it comes to getting the relationship right with the portfolio team. So the first one is trust, which which I mentioned before. So recognize that you're in it together. It's a shared agenda. If the trust is there, you can then get transparency. So particularly in Jeremy Earnshaw case, he was very brave in sharing bad news that everybody had to face up to. That is really, really important. You cannot afford for management teams to sit on bad news. So if you have that transparency, both sides have a shared understanding of what is going on, and then that puts you in a position where you can adapt the plan if you need to. The third t is once you've got the trust in place and the transparency, that then gives you traction. By traction, I mean, all of the available resource is getting into running the business, solving problems, leading the business. So you're not leaking energy and attention in the way that I described before. It's it's all getting into, well, how do we actually make that work? How do we deploy all of our available resource including leadership resource in order to generate as much value as we can. So I don't know if that resonates, Jeremy Earnshaw, with with your experience. it it it does. If I take those three, trust, transact transparency, and traction, and try and frame that into situation that I found myself in. Bizarrely, in and I do I'd I say this in all of my coaching conversations as well with not just finance based individuals and executives, but also general management and other disciplines, is that one of the challenges of leadership, which I'm sure you see, Dr. David as well, is that any anybody can deliver good news. You know, I I have a seven year old grandson, and quite frankly, if revenues are ahead of budget, if cash is ahead of target, and we're on track with everything, quite frankly, my seven year old grandson can turn up to a board meeting and deliver that news and get and get a pat on the back. It becomes slightly different when you have to impart bad news. And, of course, what happens, we all know as executives on this webinar, bad news is going to happen on average 50% of the time, if not more. So we have to deal with the bad news. Going back to why it was somewhat bizarre, I remember having a conversation with our senior private equity executive some six, twelve months down the line once we'd renegotiated covenants. And he actually said to me, do you know what? We we we gained we gained a lot of credibility as a management team through delivering and then solving the bad news. I mean, it was still bad news. You couldn't get away from that. But the challenge is to make sure that you can do that in advance. That was the key. So the trust we managed to improve through the bad news. The transparency, I think we had to to kinda look at the business model again and say, take Dr. David point. Are we looking are we are we investing management time in things that we don't need to invest in? And the reality was we had a very aggressive revenue incremental revenue based model and actually quite a heavy capital expenditure requirement as well. So the energy needed to be invested in solving those two issues. And the reality was getting halfway towards the conclusion is the revenue growth that we actually managed to achieve was, surprise surprise, significantly less than what had been modeled. And equally surprising, perhaps not in brackets, was the capital expenditure requirement was higher than had been modeled as well. So in terms of transparency, the energy needed to go into fixing that problem and what the impact of that would have. In terms of traction, bringing it all together, how could we reconstitute it? At the end of the day, the, you know, the CFO is there to be the policeman, judge, and jury. And, again, although it was relatively bad news, there was only one answer to this business issue. And the answer the the answer to the quest the question was, can you survive on the amount of capital that's been invested in this business? And the job of the CFO, myself, was to say, I'm sorry to say this, but the answer is no. Few things to think about in PE world, again, to help trust and help transparency is that it's probably not a great idea to go to a private equity owner and say, we need some more money without having done everything you possibly can first to alleviate that problem. So, for example, are your debtor days right up to date and you're collecting all of your cash? Have you gone to your suppliers and arranged deals to pay later with agreement? Have you managed to potentially, for example, do re sale and leasebacks on real estate assets? Have you done everything that you possibly can before going back to the banks and the private equity owners and saying, the answer is, or you might not want to hear it, this business needs more capital. And I think that, again, going back to the title of this webinar around can you trust your portfolio management teams, sometimes delivering the bad news or the unwelcome news, let's say, gives you the opportunity to build those three things that David mentioned. Thank you both. Yeah. And I think, Jeremy, sticking to that model that you were talking about just just now and moving on to the to the fourth question and actually up and ultimate question that we have for today. If you if... So just take a step back. If you could go back in time, and if you had a live shared real time view of cash from day one in that business that that, you know, we've been we've been alluding to in this in this in this conversation rather than a spreadsheet built for the exit case. What do you think changes? I I think what would have happened is we would have got even quicker to the stage where the private equity owner to take Dr. David Cooper point, you're all in it together. We absolutely were. There's no point crying over spilled milk when you get to the stage of really understanding what the problem is. It's more important to try and deal with finding a solution. And what we had to do quite quickly was justify some of the quite big statements that we were making. And it it was to, at certain degree, we were making statements based on the private equity modeling, which for me looked quite obvious, because we were dealing with perhaps headroom on covenant tests of maybe five, and I recall 6% was the highest level of headroom that I had going out fifteen months. I'm sure FDs and VPs and CFOs on the webinar today would probably look at 6% and think, that's not enough for me to sleep at night, and it wasn't. So what we found we were having to do was very quickly dig deeper into the business modeling rather the investor rather than the investor modeling and almost prove the point that we that we pretty much knew was there, which but we were having to do it almost in arrears. And then we were proving the point that our opinions were correct, and we could have been doing something else like running the business. So what we did was invest time and energy in something that we probably could have done a lot earlier in the process. And and it and it throws up more scenario. We didn't really have a sophisticated enough model internally that had sensitivities, so we were having to build those on a real time basis. And to take David's point as as well, you're all in it together. And the reality was it it didn't take too much in terms of further unwelcome news to get you fighting at the coal face again. So that was the ultimate conclusion is that we were almost right from the beginning constantly fighting fires and the the regular challenges of running the business. You lose a customer or more likely a customer wants you to reduce your margins because there's a competitive, tender in play. Some of those challenges were actually, very difficult to manage, but were probably quite predictable, and we could have had scenario planning in place first. And I know, David, you you have a book that you've written, all around risk in private equity. And and let let's be clear on this. None of the issues that we faced as a business were brand new. We experienced revenues flat or not quite as aggressive as we would have liked. We experienced a difficult 2008, 2009, as everyone else did in terms of the credit crunch. So the challenge was how do you deal with that? And and going back again to the title of the webinar, you do need to feel that you're all in it together and making sure that you're addressing it, as lenders and investors and management together. And and one of the challenges I know that Dr. David deals with is that this can be the first time in a lot of people's cases that they're dealing with a very hands on investor based environment. Thank you, Jeremy. And, yeah, I think, lastly, going back to Dr. David from the trust and transparency side, what we said before, maybe just to wrap up. What does it take for a p fund to actually believe that the numbers of a port... Portfolio company CFO is sending them? So actually trusting those numbers, which is something that, obviously, we we we we touched on, multiple times during this this conversation. Yeah. So I think the the thing to say on that is that the PE firm is far more likely to believe numbers that it can actually see for itself rather than numbers which it is being sent. So if you have reliable live data that everybody can see as it is unfolding, that that's transparency right there. And and everybody if everybody is looking at the same picture, there's no reason to sort of fiddle around with the numbers or massage them. It's not possible to do that. So the agenda and the problems are owned together in real time, and you can deal with them as they arise. From a trust point of view, I think it is important to say that the system itself will only give you the transparency. Where the trust comes from, going back to what Jeremy was saying before, the acid test is what happens as a CFO the first time you break bad news to the PE firm. The way they react, are they supportive? Are they critical? Are they challenging? I mean, in some cases, if I think about firms I've worked with, if the PE firm gets that wrong, it may be the last time they get bad news, but it may be the point at which they become dangerously decoupled from the reality, of the of the business. So that that real time connection is is central to getting this right. If if I could add to that, Francesco's Screenshare and Dr. David as well. I I think that's right. And and it I think this kind of conversation is valid in in other kinds of business environment as well. And I think we all know as finance executives that there are certain red flags that don't go down well. So late numbers, is obviously one of those. Moving numbers. My my favorite is, flash numbers, which, and if anybody ever mentions flash numbers to me, I I'm likely to go into orbit, as a nonexecutive now. Because the the idea that you guess numbers, because let's face it, that's what it is, and then you fit the numbers later to the flash numbers that you've already given. I mean, I mean, you couldn't make that up, but we we do it on a fairly regular basis, it would appear, in organizations. And I think to be fair to both the lenders and the private equity organizations in in my case study, I I wouldn't say they were overjoyed by what they were seeing. Quite, not the case at all. But what they could see was that there was an answer. And the answer was one that nobody wanted to hear, which was, remember that £75,000,000 that we paid for the business? Quite frankly, that now seems a bit high, because we haven't hit the targets. And that's not a welcome, a a welcome response, but that was the, that was the answer. And, of course, you you're pushing again at a time scale. Let's go back to that £20,000,000 worth of preference shares that we had, which was funding the business at a coupon rate of a very high 20%. At the end of year three, that would be worth 34,560,000. So that's another 14,560,000 of included rolled up debt that the generation of a value of the company then had to pay off in addition to the original 20. So an extra 14,500,000 through the rolled up preference shares. So it there's a clock ticking in the background as well. So the other thing about trusting your portfolio management teams from my perspective is that, again, if you're all in it together, you have to recognize that the funders, the private equity organization, and the lenders, they've got a clock ticking to deliver their returns as well. And, hence, some of the reasons that patience is not necessarily, an extended virtue when you're working within a p portfolio company. And that's the reason why. It's, it's a, a case in point that there there has to be a return and a rate of return by a certain period of time. Excellent. Yeah. I think that's a great note to end this conversation on. Thank you both. I think if there is one takeaway from from everything that we have heard today, it's that trust that we said between a PE fund and its management team, and it's not built by having more numbers or data available. It's it's built by having the numbers and the data that both sides can see, understand, and stand behind, and challenge. Jeremy's example obviously showed us what happens when that visibility isn't isn't there. So some consequences can be relatively small, like a cash prize, but then you have some more serious consequences such as a covenant risk, a breach of the covenant, and ultimately management and investors, spending more of their valuable time in actually questioning the numbers rather than acting upon it. And then you have Dr. David framework, around trust and transparency, which I think gives us a really useful way of understanding what good looks like. You want the portfolio company and the fund to be looking at the same picture, and and that's where I think technology and Agicap can really help in kind of bridging that gap, which, yeah, I think it's a lovely segue to to to how Agicap actually puts this into practice. I will do a quick overview as as as I said. No more than ten minutes just to show for those interested how those internal conversations can move away from whose numbers are right and more towards the what are we going to do about these numbers. That being said, and just to reiterate, once I've done this, we will then obviously go back, to Dr. David and Jeremy and, the q and a. So if in the meantime, any questions do pop up from this chat, feel free to start adding them in our q and a section or in the chat section, and then we will go over them in the last ten minutes. So I will share my screen and the Agicap demo. I think you should all be seeing it now. Perfect. Very quickly, Agicap, as as I very briefly mentioned at the beginning, is a treasury management system, different modules. We will, as I said, be focusing on the banking and ERP connectivity and the cash management sides in particular. It is multi bank, multi entity, and multi currency, so you do have a dedicated view per single entity, but you can also have that grouped to you. So if you are working with different companies or just... It's a it's a multi entity business, you can have that cash flow per single entity and grouped. To tailor as much as possible for those PE backed companies, what we see really resonates with those clients are a couple features. The first one is this this cash positioning section, which basically gives finance teams real time visibility, when it comes to their cash. So how it works is Anchor Capital connects automatically to your banks. You can connect to all the banks across the world and then, will automatically retrieve on a daily basis the, cash balances. So if I just go back to where we currently are, Tuesday twenty second, as you can see here, it's a daily visibility. Generally, it's a thirty day rolling forecast, but this can be extended where I can see my bank accounts one by one, and it's showing me my cash balance every day. And then what's obviously interesting, and I will get more detail on this later, is it that forward looking, how that cash balance is being calculated by taking into consideration those invoices? So this is the first, section, real time cash visibility. I will then obviously go back into this to talk about that covenant risk. Before I do, the other feature which is often requested by, companies that are p backed is the thirteen week. So it's a setting that we have here. Just a couple top... A couple toggles. You can obviously modify. For now, I will leave it at at thirteen weeks. And what this basically now shows you is your infos and outflows divided by categories that you'll obviously go and create so you can completely personalize the section. You create your own categories and subcategories based on what you want to keep track of, such as revenue, rent, salaries, you know, payroll, pensions, VAT, and and all that kind of stuff. And what this is now showing me is how my inflows and outflows will vary in the upcoming weeks based on the invoicing data. So that is obviously one of the big and key advantages of Agicap. We connect to your ERP, so not only your bank, but also your ERP or accounting tool. And we'll go and retrieve in real time all of the... Those purchase and sales ledgers, those those outstanding invoices or open invoices. So everything that is still yet to be paid and yet to be collected. What we'll do is we'll retrieve that information, and we'll plot them based on their due dates. We won't just stop there because we always know that sometimes due dates don't get respected. So we do give, obviously, clients that flexibility of playing around with those due dates and moving them either manually themselves or even asking Agicap to calculate the client behavior and apply that DSO on those due dates. And the output really is just having this automated real time thirteen week visibility, where if I do want to see what I need to go and pay, for example, in my operating flows next week, I can just click on it and I have that drill down view showing me exactly what needs to be paid in the upcoming weeks and having that flexibility, as we said, of moving around those due dates and understanding if I can pay those suppliers or not. Going back into my balance summary, another feature which often is highly requested from p backed companies is tracking covenants. So, obviously, you have different covenants to track, but one of them generally tends to be that cash position from your banks. What's really great about Agicap is that you can go and, in the steps management module, add all of your central bank loans that you have, but also your credit lines. So if you're working with some RCFs, you can go and add them directly in this section, and you can keep track of all of your credit facilities that you are currently using. Once I've implemented this and I've added my credit facilities, if I go back into my cash positioning and I decide to filter by bank, what now this shows me is a breakdown by bank, just some fake examples here with with very common high street banks, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, and Santander, and the breakdown of all of my bank accounts. So it doesn't... So not only does it show my current account, as you can see here, but it'll also show my credit line facilities. In this case, I've got two credit lines in my Barclays, an RCF, and an ABL. And it will show the cash balance of these facilities every week and, therefore, my total cash balance of that bank. Therefore, allowing me to have that real time visibility of those cash availabilities per bank and avoiding to breach those covenants. And I think going back to what Jeremy said, this is exact... This is what you didn't have on day one. And if this had existed, that covenant risk would have probably showed up in week one rather than in year one. So this is definitely something which is which is often quite quite requested. Obviously, we are in an era of, AI, and we are an AI first company. So to help companies in, you know, managing their cash flow in the most automated way possible, we have introduced some different features where we are leveraging your AI. The most recent one, this has just been come out. It's officially been released a couple weeks now, which is, I think, very exciting is the smart assistant. It's almost kind of imagine it your own chat GPT or Claude designed for. So it is using our LLM and our internal kind of language. And, yeah, you can ask some questions such as which customers are paying me late, what happens to my runway if I delete this payment. You can ask all the questions that you want. It's unlimited token usage. And in the space of a couple minutes, this AI assistant will basically act as your personal finance assistant and and help you in in in, I guess, going back to what we're saying, understanding those numbers a lot better and then sharing it with the relevant people. That being said, I know that some companies maybe here are are currently using Claude, and and and they're obviously enjoying all the benefits that Claude can offer and the MCP of Claude in particular can offer. We do have a direct connection with Claude if you are a current Claude user. And, therefore, if you want to take your AI analysis to a whole new level, you can connect Agicap to your Claude account. The outcome of this is... I will just show a quick example with this board pack presentation. So I just did a quick simulation where I basically gave us a prompt to go and fetch all the paid transactions from entity x y zed and to create a board presentation for q two twenty twenty six, include an executive summary, a thirteen week forecast trend analysis, and some key risks. And as you can see, what basically is doing right now is it's fetching that information in real time from Agicap. So that data that's already been enriched inside of Agicap is fetching it, and it's producing this, q two board pack output in a matter of minutes. And then, obviously, you know, we can tailor it from there. We can build a skill, so we don't need to then give the same prompt every time, but it can just do it automatically for us. And then even go and execute it directly and send it to whoever we want to send it, either inter... Internally via Teams or even via, email. So this obviously, does take that kind of reporting to a whole new level. And lastly, just something else which I think is... Resonates a lot with with, companies that do need to obviously speak with PE funds or even just internally when when they do need to present to the board are also those dashboards. So, again, if you don't have Claude, or you don't want to potentially use Claude, you can then, obviously, here in this dashboard section, create your own dashboards. You can give it a prompt, and it will create the graph for you if you don't want to. If not, it's very simple. You can just go and select what you want. As long as the data is available in Agicap, which if it's financially if it's financial related, it should be, then you can go and create your own, dashboards. And the great thing about this is that, obviously, it allows you to kind of empower those key stakeholders so that they can have real time visibility and access to the data without having to email, you know, the FC or the the head of finance and ask them to prepare a report and send it over Excel. Whenever they want, they can just log in, access the dashboard that they're interested in, and it's obviously all, automated and updated directly from AnchorCap. So they don't need to ask or double check to see if it's up to date. ATCAP is also obviously available, on the App Store. So if you aren't, using your computer and you're out and about and you have a phone readily available, you can obviously then also download the ATCAP app and access this level of dashboard and reporting also directly on the go. I think I see on my side in terms of the main key main features. Again, obviously, there is a lot more to to dive into. Couple of things. If that does resonate with whoever is joining us in this session, two ways to to find out more about us. One, as I said, if you are in the London area on the October 15, we'd be glad to to have you, join our meeting and, sorry, join our AnchorCap days, our live event. And secondly, there should be here somewhere, I think, above maybe mine, Jeremy, and David's face on the right, a request an AnchorCap demo button. If you do click on that, that will basically, send an alert to us, and then we will reach out to you just to see, yeah, just just to understand kind of the interest and obviously set up a tailored demo to go a bit more into detail. Okay. I think we are good on time. We have five minutes left, so we should be good. And I think there there are some questions in the meantime. I am struggling to find them. Ah, Simon Venables. Here we go. Two questions from Simon. Does the model deal with an ID facility to sales give liquidity on day plus one at 90%, and you get the other 10% when the debts are paid? That is a question, obviously, more for you to me and to. Yes, Simon. I do remember we had a brief conversation, I think, me and you, a year ago now, to have been on some updates since we last spoken. So, again, if you are interested, Simon, I am happy to, maybe have a dedicated meeting, and I can show you basically how that works. Absolutely. And just seeing that invoice financing is marked as new, does that mean I can feed a sales forecast in to drive the thirteen week forecast? Yes. That can be done either via, the p and l. So if you have a sales forecast, you can upload it and feed that into your thirteen weeks. Or if not, you can obviously feed it first through the invoice financing if you are using invoice financing and set those rules. And then that will then subsequently feed into thirty week forecast. So, yes, that is possible. I hope that answers your question, Simon. If anyone else has other questions, now is chance to ask. If not, I might have one or two questions. Thank you. Yes, please. A new demo. Perfect. I mean, if you wanna click on request and enter cap demo, that should, as I said, send an alert to us to to, to reach out to you, and I will be in touch with you in the next couple of days. As we wait maybe for some other questions from the others, I have two questions on my side. So I'm just double checking if there's anything else. No. Okay. Dr. David Cooper, I'll start with you. My question to you that I had here is why are... Everyone talks about the first, you know, the famous first a hundred days when, when a PE fund comes into a portco. Why are those first one hundred days, so important, and what should the CFO be doing, obviously, from that kind of... You know, even if you wanna give some some advice to maybe some CFOs here who are during, you know, in that one hundred day period? Well, look. Come back to what I was saying before. The thing about the first one hundred days is when you meet the full reality, you get the full story. So everything up to that point has been about building conviction. As a PE investor, it's an illiquid investment, so it's an irrevocable decision. You you kind of jumped off the diving board. The first one hundred days is whether you realize, you know, is there any water in the pool or not? Or are you gonna bang your head on the bottom? I think one of the best things a CFO can do is as far as possible, put themselves in the shoes of the investor. So cultivating that investor mindset, and get off to a good start. If there is bad news, you know, Jeremy Earnshaw discovered all kinds of problems, but he was very candid. He was very professional, and it went down very well. I think that is an incredibly important point. It was a brave thing that he did. But if you if you spot something which an investor would want to know about, stand up, put your hand up, report it. The one thing PE investors hate more than anything is surprises. So, you know, goes back, be transparent, be candid, see it from their point of view, I think, would be the summary. I think if I could add to that slightly more from the finance executive's point of view, and and I I coach this as well, is that it's it's just no longer enough to do a fantastic job with the data. And that transition, particularly when you've got a very interested investor. It's making that transition for people who are thinking about going into a p backed organization is that you've got to go very quickly from being a subject matter expert, and quite frankly, a pretty good one. And, you know, you've done all of the things that you're supposed to do, but you're now starting again, and you're dealing with a different investor base. And my advice as a coach and a mentor now, having seen things from the nonexecutive point of view and a chair of audit and risk, is to spend a bit of time investing in your external stakeholders. So whether that be nonexecutives like me, I might only get half an hour to make a judgment on you as a finance executive at a board meeting every quarter. So that's that's a really challenging thirty minutes when you're presenting your report, for example. So if I understand how you are and your mentality outside of the board meeting, I think that's really well worth the time invested in doing that. And similarly, with the investors as well. Going through an interview process to be selected or going through the transaction where you've demonstrated your credibility by offering up credible and robust due diligence, you start again. So really invest in that relationship with the investor because they haven't got much time to make a judgment on you. And it goes back to those three areas that David mentioned, one of which particularly was trust. Thanks, Jeremy. And and David, obviously. Jeremy, you saw you saw my question I wanted to ask to you. So I think you you answered it without me having to ask it. And I think that is us, done in terms of time. Again, if there are some last questions, I am happy to go over them, but I think that is it from the, crowd here. And, yeah, I think it was a very productive session. Thank you, David. Thank you, Jeremy, for taking the time for this, chat conversation. If anyone does want to reach out to them directly, feel free to to reach out either to us, and we will put you in contact. If not, you can find them on on on LinkedIn. And, again, if you are, in and around the London area on the October 15, happy to have you on board. Should be a good event. Or if not, if interested to know more about AnchCap, you can request AnchCap then, and we will reach out in the next couple days. Thank you. Thank you, David and Jeremy, once again. And I will, yeah. That's it. Perfect. Thank you all. Take care. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye, Bye. bye.