No Question Too Big or Too Small

While the state of California decides that financial literacy is as important as cursive the rest of our world is figuring out win/loss and how to gain market share or optimize their vendor portfolio for data, information services, and content-enabled tech. It’s about tactics after all in the market we’re in. Out of the woodwork clients have been asking us about category a, vendor b, competitors c, d, and e, or product, f, g and h.

Real examples of late having to do with competitive reviews, vendor and product comparisons, sectoral changes and market opportunities include:

1. GRC, KYC, KYS, media monitoring, and news aggregation providers who focus on reputational risk at the corporate level and how that compares to pure plays such as Reptrak.
2. KYC/KYB screening providers.
3. Investor information monitoring tools & workflow providers.
4. Media monitoring providers.

Acronym soup anyone? We untangle this spaghetti to look at competitors, use cases and users, feature sets and how they stack up.

Another client wanted to know about companies who’d made it successfully through their platform journey — examples of companies that have made the transition from content to platform. This includes those that evolved from a data, research, or standalone content perspective into SaaS (read technology) company including others who went beyond that journey to also enable the integration of internal, and/or third-party data sources, or customer data. It’s all about convergence after all.

We pulled from our archives to share analysis about Bloomberg Industries Group, CAS, Circana, Cision, (what was then IHS) Karneg, LSEG Eikon, Meltwater, OAG, Qualtrics, and vLex to name a few. And some got part of the way there such as Vixio or here again RepTrak. But the case studies are here whether in individual company analyses or in ‘oldie but goodie’ operating practice analyses about platform business models, or scaling data businesses –pieces that have stood the test of time.

I joke with some clients and our team about the itty-bitty sectors we get to analyze, because no one else on the planet is crazy enough to do it. Three real examples:

1. Analyzing freemium legal information solutions providers in Poland (and no it was not a freemium legal information provider in Poland who asked!)
2. Taking a US-based medical research solution and testing feasibility for taking it into four or five emerging markets.
3. Doing customer-facing due diligence for a (then) boutique fashion and style analytics business.

Another great success story — helping a $3 million telecom consulting boutique turn itself into a syndicated research and advisory business. That company exited a few years later at a revenue stream of $40 million.

Another client — a single shareholder owned company joined us when his business was under $1 million. He exited 10 years later with a valuation of over $400m. I can’t tell you the niche area his business covered, or you’d recognize him and then I’d break confidentiality so no we won’t go there.

But suffice to say we have a lot of those exit stories in our nearly 30-year history. We call them extra zeros. That’s why CEOs call us to join our elite membership community.

My all-time favorite — a PE backed operator who was about to buy a helicopter fleet. Turns out a keyway that fleet was monetized was gathering news. You know — those local channel 4 and 7 helicopters flying — blades a whirring — over some flood, criminal running, or car chase below?

There is real money that changes hands when those fleets are rented out and this gentleman didn’t want to buy a fleet and then find his revenue stream was going to go away. So, like any proper diligence we were asked to evaluate the future of helicopter news gathering… Turns out he didn’t pursue the deal so we didn’t do the diligence, but it would have been fun to look at drones, regulations, news licensing and all that would have been emerging around the corner to bolster or threaten that revenue stream… if only.

So, you see folks in the world of data information, or content-enabled tech (or helicopter-enabled news!) there is no question too big or too small.

We’re here for consulting, advisory, and syndicated research. It’s always fun and never dull. We help our vendor clients grow. We help our buyside clients save money. And like Switzerland we love being neutral in-between calling the hard shots — like the time we had to call a CEO and tell him we were hearing too many stories about their firm’s difficult to-do-business with reputation among buyers and it was costing them.

He knew anecdotally or in his gut but the fact he’d heard it from a trusted third party who was hearing it consistently from many customers — well it couldn’t be ignored.

Another company whose reputation was to buy, buy, buy but never integrate in case they would then sell, sell, sell left back-end billing and customer systems a nightmare. We heard the customer complaints and got to deliver the bad news. Another had 35 CMS systems to rationalize. They had to clean them up before they could get onto a growth story…. Oh yay! We hear about and support the operating issues too. It’s never a dull world.

So if you want to know about the fastest growing segments, which ones are at risk, whether the ones you’re investing in are ripe for success or under threat or how your business could operate better, or how your vendor portfolio could be streamlined — — let’s just say we have you covered and no data, information or content-enabled tech segment is too big or too small.