Stoke the Fire: 3 Ways to Fuel Your Middle Market Potential

Posted on: August 30th, 2016

Many middle market companies reach a point where further growth becomes difficult as most of them have trouble realizing their potential. Generating new revenue doesn’t come easily and this might be due to lack of growth capital or lack of focus on new customer acquisition.

Middle market companies have the advantage of being smaller and more nimble than large companies.

Here are 3 ways middle market companies can fuel their growth.

1. Become Consistent

Consistency, in all of its forms, is a crucial factor to success in a business. Customers need consistent customer service, employees need consistent leadership and teams need consistent goals.

McDonald’s is a great example of a company that has delivered consistency as to product and service across its +1 billion of products served.

Build a model that delivers consistency and then replicate the model to scale and bring on more volume.

2. Improve Your Sales Management

The sales team is the heart of any company; they are the ones who drive new customer acquisition and can provide valuable market feedback for new product innovation.

If the sales team becomes complacent, revenue growth will flatten out. Inspired sales management and developing new ways of engaging with your salesforce is critical to ensure high levels of productivity.

3. Mergers and Acquisitions

Middle market companies should focus on acquiring funds for mergers and acquisitions. This is because the development of new business through mergers and acquisitions fuels growth and adds value to the company; it’s not only about revenue growth.

It increases the cost efficiency and the share price of the company after the merger. Mergers and acquisitions accelerate regional growth of companies and often is a safer way to enter a new market.

As the Fed decides to ease interest rates, middle market acquisition financing structures will benefit in a number of ways. The underlying values of middle market companies will increase leading to a higher enterprise value and lower loan to value ratios for existing portfolio companies of acquisition financing lenders.

The role of acquisition financing is infrequently elevated above a functional transactional one. When a business needs financing to acquire, they go to the market and source acquisition financing to supplement their equity investment to close the deal. Despite existing in many different forms, acquisition financing is rarely explained in terms of the value it brings to the acquirer.

Acquisition financing underwriting usually focuses on business and financial issues that underpin the stability of cash flow. Providers of acquisition financing usually validate the durability of a company’s competitive advantage and the depth of its resource base. Environmental issues are usually not a major part of the analysis in today’s service and technology-based economy.