Business Development
The operating work that makes a business worth owning.
Kadenwood works inside companies on the commercial and operating levers that move enterprise value: business development, marketing, sales, operations and revenue acceleration, with superintelligence deployed to raise throughput across all of them. We provide that work to companies preparing for a sale, a debt raise or an equity raise, and to the companies in which we invest.
Where the work applies
Before a process, and after an investment.
Before a sale or a capital raise, the work is preparation for diligence, and it pays to start well before the process opens. Acquirers, lenders and equity investors price what they can verify: revenue that a process produces rather than a founder, margins that hold under scrutiny, reporting that reconciles, and a management team that carries the business. Gains that are realised and documented hold up in quality-of-earnings and commercial diligence; projected ones get discounted.
In the companies Kadenwood invests in, the same work is the value-creation plan: a first hundred days, then a short list of commercial and operating priorities, owned by management, measured from an agreed baseline, reported to the board and run against the hold period and the exit. Kadenwood invests as an operator, and the engagement is the same either way; only the ownership is different. We say so plainly when an engagement is not one we would take.
Objectives
Build to sell, build to scale, or build to last.
The owner's objective sets the strategy. The levers are the same in each case; their order, the timeline and the capital that fits each path are not. Many owners take a middle path, such as a minority recapitalization that provides liquidity while the owner keeps control, or a majority sale with a retained stake, and the work follows the structure chosen.
Start hereThe owner's objective
01
Build to sell
- Horizon
- The next process, prepared a year or more ahead.
- Capital that fits
- An acquirer, strategic or financial.
- What it takes
- Preparing for an exit, ideally a year or more before the process opens: earnings that hold up in diligence, revenue that transfers without the founder, clean contracts and working capital, a management team that stays, and an equity story an acquirer will test. The capital structure is kept simple, and the work is ordered by what diligence examines first.
02
Build to scale
- Horizon
- The next stage of growth.
- Capital that fits
- Growth equity, growth debt, or both.
- What it takes
- Long-term growth, often funded by growth equity, growth debt or both: a go-to-market that grows with investment, unit economics that hold as it does, management depth, an operating model that absorbs the volume, and the reporting an investor or lender requires. The work is ordered by what the next stage of growth needs.
03
Build to last
- Horizon
- The next generation of ownership.
- Capital that fits
- Conservative leverage and long-duration minority capital.
- What it takes
- Long-term private ownership, often across generations: the owner's legacy, built on durable cash flows, conservative leverage, governance, professional management and a succession plan, so that the business depends on no single person, the owner included. The work is ordered by what succession and continuity of ownership require.
Investor readiness
Ready for the capital the plan requires.
The work that drives growth and value is also what capital providers examine. Acquirers, lenders and equity investors each test different things, so the strategy differs with the capital being raised.
| Acquirers | Lenders | Equity investors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| First question | Are the earnings real, recurring and transferable? | Will cash flow repay the debt through a downturn, and what secures it? | Is growth repeatable, and can this team put new capital to work? |
| What they examine | A quality-of-earnings review with documented adjustments, net debt and debt-like items, the working-capital target, revenue by customer, change-of-control terms and dependence on the owner. | Reported against adjusted EBITDA, conversion to free cash flow, leverage and fixed-charge coverage, covenant headroom, monthly reporting and, for asset-based lenders, the borrowing base. | Organic growth, gross margin and unit economics by product, customer and channel, retention, management beyond the founder, and governance fit for an outside shareholder. |
| Readiness means | Each item evidenced before the process opens. What cannot be evidenced tends to move into earnouts, escrow or price. | A credit story, a lender pack and a forecast with tested headroom. | An equity story backed by a bottom-up model, KPIs that reconcile across the deck, the model and the data room, and a data room in order. |
Acquirers
Are the earnings real, recurring and transferable?
What they examine
A quality-of-earnings review with documented adjustments, net debt and debt-like items, the working-capital target, revenue by customer, change-of-control terms and dependence on the owner.
Readiness means
Each item evidenced before the process opens. What cannot be evidenced tends to move into earnouts, escrow or price.
Lenders
Will cash flow repay the debt through a downturn, and what secures it?
What they examine
Reported against adjusted EBITDA, conversion to free cash flow, leverage and fixed-charge coverage, covenant headroom, monthly reporting and, for asset-based lenders, the borrowing base.
Readiness means
A credit story, a lender pack and a forecast with tested headroom.
Equity investors
Is growth repeatable, and can this team put new capital to work?
What they examine
Organic growth, gross margin and unit economics by product, customer and channel, retention, management beyond the founder, and governance fit for an outside shareholder.
Readiness means
An equity story backed by a bottom-up model, KPIs that reconcile across the deck, the model and the data room, and a data room in order.
Core business development
Six areas of work.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic of the business. What comes out of it is a short list of prioritised initiatives, each with an owner, a baseline and a timetable. Owners usually arrive with one of these areas named and find others attached to it; we scope against what we find, not only against what was asked for.
01Marketing and distribution
Positioning, demand generation, channel and partnership strategy, and the marketing operations that tie spend to revenue. Demand the company owns rather than rents, carried by channels that transfer with the business.
02Sales
The process that turns demand into contracted revenue: qualification, stages, pricing and deal structure, forecasting, renewals and expansion. Revenue a process produces, not revenue a founder produces.
03Sales division build-outs
Designing and standing up a sales organization: coverage model, role design, territories and quotas, incentive compensation, sales operations and leadership, then hiring and ramping against a plan.
04Talent placement
Defining the seats that carry the value, then searching for, assessing and placing the leaders and operators to fill them, with incentives that keep them.
05Operations
The operating model, the finance function and the systems that carry fulfilment and the back office: reporting a lender, a buyer or a board can read without translation, and working capital that converts.
06Efficiency improvements
Throughput raised in a fixed order through the Throughput Sequence: interrogate, eliminate, simplify, compress, and only then deploy superintelligence. More output from the same team, measured against an agreed baseline.
Revenue engine
How demand becomes contracted, repeatable revenue.
Operating engine
How the business delivers, reports and scales without the owner at the centre.
Enterprise value
Earnings that hold up, revenue that transfers, growth that scales.
Read by capital providers
Acquirers, lenders and equity investors, each through its own questions.
The Throughput Sequence
More output from the same business.
Throughput is the cheapest margin a company can find: the same team and the same capital, producing more. It shows up in EBITDA, and EBITDA is what an acquirer capitalises. We raise it in a fixed order, and superintelligence comes last, not first.
By superintelligence we mean the most capable reasoning systems available, used in named workflows under human review, inside the company's own data and controls, and accountable to the KPIs the business already runs on.
01
Interrogate
Every requirement, report and approval is questioned and traced to the person who owns it. A requirement nobody owns is a candidate for removal.
02
Eliminate
Steps that exist only because they always have are removed before anything is improved. The fastest process is the one that no longer runs.
03
Simplify
What survives is simplified and standardised: one way of taking work in, one way of delivering it, one version of the numbers.
04
Compress
Cycle times come down: fewer handoffs, shorter queues, and decisions made where the information sits.
05
Deploy
Only then is the work handed to superintelligence, so that it scales the process rather than the waste. The aim is more output from the same team, measured against the baseline agreed at the start.
Operations
Throughput
More output from the same team.
Unit economics
Margin
Cost per unit of work falls.
Earnings
EBITDA
Gains realised and documented.
Valuation
Enterprise value
What an acquirer capitalises.
How engagements run
Embedded, scoped, and measured.
The terms below are the same on every engagement. They are the reason we can only run a few at a time.
Embedded
We work inside the business rather than alongside it. Engagements are staffed by the people doing the work, and they sit in the operating rhythm: the same meetings, the same numbers, the same accountability as the team.
Defined scope
Each engagement is scoped to a build with a stated beginning and a stated end. We are hired to install something and to leave it running. A retainer that renews because nothing was finished is not the arrangement.
Measured against baselines
We record the operating baseline before starting: how demand arrives, what converts, what the owner personally carries, and what the reporting withstands. We then report against it. Direction is reported honestly, including when it is flat.
Selective by design
We take a small number of engagements at a time, because embedding is the method. Where we would not have been prepared to put our own capital behind the outcome, we decline the mandate and explain why.
Questions
What owners ask first.
How is this different from hiring a consulting firm?
Consultants advise. Operators build.
A consulting engagement usually ends in a recommendation the client then has to implement with its own people, on its own time. Ours ends with the work running inside the business: distribution, sales process, reporting, and the people holding them. We are accountable for whether it still runs once we have gone.
Who is this for?
Companies preparing for a transaction, and the companies we invest in.
Most engagements are with founder-led and sponsor-backed companies in the middle market that are preparing for a sale, a recapitalization, or a debt or equity raise, or that are building to last. Sponsors and family offices also engage it across a portfolio, and the same work runs inside Kadenwood's own investments as their value-creation plan.
Do you only work with companies you invest in?
No. Most engagements involve no investment by us at all.
The test is the same either way: we take on work where we would have been prepared to own the outcome. The engagement is scoped and priced as advisory, and neither side is obliged to transact afterwards.
Where does this sit next to your advisory work?
Advisory runs the transaction. Business development changes what the business is worth before one, or after it.
The two are scoped and engaged separately, and neither is conditioned on the other. An owner who works with us on the operating side is free to run a process with whoever they choose, and we will say so at the outset rather than at the end.
What does an engagement look like?
It opens with a diligence conversation running in both directions.
If there is a fit, we scope a build against what we found, usually some combination of marketing and distribution, sales, operations and efficiency, and the hires that carry them, then embed to install it and hand it over against a defined finish. If there is not a fit, we say so, and you keep the read-out either way.
Transaction credentials available upon request.