At Perpetual, we collaborate with a diverse range of industries and sectors. One of our areas of expertise is finance, where we have gained considerable experience on the agency side.
To get a better understanding of our work with financial services companies, we invite you to check out our case studies for Reuters, Reach Financial, and US Bank. We understand that money is what keeps the world moving, and we believe that delivering high-quality products and services to all parties involved is crucial.
Recently, we’ve begun to create a series of case studies to pinpoint problem areas and brainstorm innovative solutions. Paired with our interest in the finance space (specifically private equity), we decided to take on modernizing intranets.
Before diving into the case study, let’s take a look at what an intranet is or what it at least attempts to be.
An intranet is typically an organization's single internal (hence intra) site for managing company information and for fostering collaboration. Some additional goals of intranets include:
Intranets are certainly not a new concept and have been around in various forms for decades.
In many cases, intranets fail to achieve any of the promised benefits listed above. According to Gartner, 9 out of 10 intranets fail at achieving their initial goals. We interviewed several intranet users and took a peak at their intranets to understand how they use their company intranets and where (if applicable) they fall short.
Now that we understand the issues with intranets, let’s take a look at our target user.
If you have ever seen the HGTV show “Flip or Flop” you’ll have a pretty good concept of what Private equity firms do. On the show, Tarek and Christina purchase and invest in dilapidated homes with the hopes of eventually selling the home for a profit.
Private Equity firms can ultimately be likened to house flippers. Both have the goal of investing in an asset (a business in the PE case) to eventually turn a profit. Firms search for underperforming/undervalued businesses and invest to sell for profit.
The search and acquisition of a business often start with a strategy based on a set of characteristics the firm is looking for. This could include:
Once a company is sourced, the process of closing the deal is collaborative, time-consuming, and requires a ton of documentation and due diligence. This process can be managed in many different ways through either a specified deal pipeline software or permission drives, docs, and spreadsheets.
For this case study we decided to focus on the PE Associate. PE associates take on an incredible amount of work and act as the backbone of the deal process. A PE associate will typically carry a deal from its inception to checking in on the company after a deal has been closed. We put together a quick persona to summarize the wants and needs of a typical PE associate.
Disclaimer: We were unable to get in touch with actual PE associates for this exercise and had to rely on PE articles for our persona.
Equipped with our knowledge of intranets and Private Equity firms, we set out to create a purpose-built intranet by pulling Deal Room/pipeline functionality along with company information into a single platform.
Our first step was to consider what functionality we’d want to include in our new intranet and how we’d organize it. We decided to split up functionality into the following high-level menu items.
With this configuration, we could delineate day-to-day work functionality from traditional intranet features. The dashboard brings it all together by leveraging key information related to the PE associates day to day workflow.
Key elements include:
The strategies section of our concept is a place for generating ideas and collaborating on new investment prospects and deals. In practice, strategies would become a hub of information and a wealth of knowledge due to real work and documentation happening right on the intranet.
Attached to every strategy are prospects. Prospects track companies for potential deals, providing general company information, collaborative discussions, and related files. All of this information and history is kept when a prospect eventually gets promoted to a deal, ensuring a comprehensive record is kept.
Finally, the most important piece of any PE workflow is the deal pipeline. This part of the application tracks all the necessary steps for taking a deal to completion.
We had a great time putting this case study together and imagining a more purpose-built intranet for the private equity space. An impactful intranet can boost productivity and communication within your company making a user-friendly experience worth the investment. A system catered to your employees and their needs can help you stand above the competition.
