Our Network
The brain and memory of our firm.
It’s hard for middle-market companies to get access to the acquisition dealmakers at big headquarters. It’s also hard for them to take the broad pulse of the private equity, hedge fund and family office capital markets.
But they need to. They also need to know exactly what kinds of deals have been going down across markets.
We work with a group of very bright folks with deep relationships. What makes us different is how we share those relationships and the information we gather with each other. The middle market is full of quirks and inefficiencies. It is not an organized, “on-the-screen” market. At Headwaters, we are built to dig out and share that information seamlessly across our firm. We can find buyers, capital providers and partners around the world in no time and have warm, personal introductions made instantly. This increases our reach for clients and greatly reduces the time it takes to get things done. And time is risk.
When it comes to transaction support, bankers and advisors love to talk about “senior attention”. But that usually means senior attention from only a few people. At our firm, it means attention from all of our Managing Directors. It’s a powerful information mining and transaction execution machine. It’s in our DNA. It’s just how we roll.
We’ve added leverage points for our clients in this power alley of ours. We tap trusted investment bankers in our international partnership, Mergers Alliance. This affords us safe, confidential access to international strategic buyers and equity groups through a group of 250 banking professionals in 42 offices in 17 countries. These are first-name, how’s-your-spouse relationships with near instantaneous feedback loops. And lastly, our FODIS group grants Headwaters clients unrivaled access to their client base of over 1700 family offices interested in direct investment in companies.
When it comes to transactions, systems matter too and we invest heavily to be leading edge in this aspect of our industry. We’re developing a comprehensive enterprise system to collect, parse and distribute information across our entire platform. So we access the institutional memory of recent transaction interactions with over 1300 private equity groups and 1400 operating companies to guide our search for buyers and investors for our clients. This helps us predict buyer behavior and keep information leakage in the deal process to an absolute minimum.
Markets exist because of a real or perceived asymmetry of information. The middle market is the wild west of the capital markets primarily because information flows are broken. We’ve equipped our bankers and advisors with a toolkit of proprietary information and relationship access that reaches across markets, asset classes and oceans to tip the scales in favor of our clients.
