Founded in 2007, Tenzing Partners has specialised in business transfers and mergers & acquisitions since its inception. It has grown over the years, but continues to rely on very manual processes. “Over time, we realised that our processes were not optimised,” explains Daniel Schneider, co-founder and partner of the company. “For example, we still work a lot with Excel files for our databases, which is not really manageable beyond a certain amount of information about companies, investors and sectors. Not to mention that we constantly need to start all over again with extracting data needed for different uses.”
Hence the indispensable need to reconsider the general organisation of all this data, which represents a gold mine… provided it is well used and easy to exploit. Especially in the context of the international Globalscope Partners Network (which brings together more than 600 M&A professionals in some 50 countries around the world, for more than $2 billion of investment flows) of which Tenzing Partners is a member. “We work on interconnected files and sometimes there can be inefficiencies in the exchange of information,” Mr Schneider notes.
“The ability to listen”
The COVID crisis served as a trigger. It strongly slowed down the company’s activity (files put on hold and no closings), the time freed up “by constraint” allowed Mr Schneider to “take his nose off the grindstone”. And, thus, to put on paper a certain number of ideas to improve the operational processes of the company, in particular in the context of State aids for process and organisational innovation.
“I then contacted Luxinnovation and was put in touch with the R&D and Innovation Support department. In two phone conversations, we were able to clearly define our needs and received recommendations for directions we could pursue. Then we had a face-to-face workshop where the Luxinnovation team really challenged us,” says Mr Schneider. “The discussions were mainly about our way of thinking and working, and the methodology of our work packages. The team really took us by the hand and spent a lot of time, especially to understand our business. I really appreciated their ability to listen. The exchanges were intensive and fruitful and we even deepened some of our ideas in relation to the initial project.”
Ongoing challenge
With each subsequent email exchange, Mr Schneider received several points on which he had to revise his copy in order to make his application more solid and, above all, clearer for the future evaluators of the Ministry of the Economy’s.
This strategy was a success, as the grant application submitted in mid-October was approved at the end of November.
In the end, Tenzing Partners will receive substantial support for the implementation of a project that will last three years and will require, among other things, the recruitment of a data engineer. “We have already started with the ‘database’ component. This was the essential starting point to achieve a complete system that will be able to interconnect efficiently throughout the network.”