Financial
Excellence
for investor-grade companies
A trusted advisor to private equity funds, portfolio companies and ambitious businesses, Capiital creates the strategic insight and performance visibility required to unlock sustainable value and growth.
Each part of the process
held to one standard.
Rest on one for more
Performance Visibility
The measures a board can rely on, and reporting that holds up to scrutiny.
Financial Leadership
Senior financial judgment, for as long as it is needed and no longer.
Transactions
Diligence, modelling, and the questions a buyer will ask — asked earlier, by us.
Operational Finance
The close, the team, the systems. Unremarkable work, done precisely.
Stewardship,
not sentiment.
We hold that the heritage upon which a company is built is its principal asset, and that legacy is a matter of stewardship rather than sentiment. What we believe follows from that, and from little else.
Judgment is not delegable
Every mandate is led, executed and concluded by the principal who accepted it. There is no second team.
The work must outlast our presence
An engagement that leaves a dependency behind has not finished; it has paused, and at the client’s expense.
Candour is cheapest early
The gap a buyer will find is better named by us, in a room of our choosing, long before they look for it.
What is not counted is not governed
Not everything that matters can be measured. Rather more of it can be measured than usually is.
Having sat on
both sides of the table.
We have prepared companies for scrutiny, and we have been the party applying it. The same small number of things holds true on both occasions. None of them is complicated, and none is ever dealt with as early as it could have been.
The monthly pack says more than the forecast
A month’s reporting describes the two years ahead more accurately than the forecast filed beside it, and at a fraction of the effort.
Visibility comes before speed
The work before an acceleration is almost always the same, and almost never discussed: settling what is to be counted, then counting it the same way twice.
The quiet quarters matter most
Value accrues in the seasons when no one is watching. What held in the second quarter is what makes the fourth defensible.
Complexity outgrows its instruments
A company seldom loses control of its business. It loses sight of it, which arrives at the same place by a longer and more expensive road.
Three situations,
told without names.
The affairs of those we advise are their own. Identifying detail has been set aside; the situation, the finding and the remedy stand as they were.
Industrial manufacturing
A second-generation manufacturer, profitable and reputable, weighing a sale the family had not yet resolved upon. The usual course would have been to tidy the accounts and accept the discount a purchaser applies to reporting of that kind. We read it the other way round: the reporting was not the weakness but the place the value lay hidden. Margin, restated by product line, showed a business worth more than its owners believed; they went to market a year later knowing what they held.
Sponsor-backed services
A services platform ten weeks into its first institutional ownership, with a sound plan and a newly seated board. The customary answer to a plan slipping is more reporting. We did the opposite, and removed two of the three sets of figures in circulation, keeping the one the board and the operators could both read. The plan was revised twice in its first year, each time on evidence rather than instinct.
Life sciences
A research-led company nine months from a raise, trusted for its science and doubted for its accounts. Convention would have deferred the round until a finance function had been built. We held the date and looked instead at how the company was owned: the legal and financial ownership of its intellectual property was rearranged, which settled its tax position and made it eligible for funding it had been told was out of reach. The round closed well above the range the founder had thought realistic.
A house of conviction
and capital.
Capiital was founded on a single principle: that disciplined judgment, free of conflict, compounds across generations.
Value seldom sits within one function. It emerges between them — in what sales promises, what production can hold, what procurement concedes, and what the balance sheet is left to record.
“The firm is built on the conviction that judgment is not delegable”
Every mandate is led, executed and concluded by the principal who accepted it.
Notes from
the desk.
Considered views on the forces at work in the capital markets, written when there is something worth saying.
The next word
is yours.
We accept a small number of engagements each year, by introduction and by fit. If you are weighing a transaction, a recovery or a transformation, we would be glad to hear of it.
hello@capiital.eu