Demand looks at a company’s market proposition, the customers it serves and how to maximise growth and margin potential. It works across product, sales & marketing teams to ensure the opportunity has been adequately assessed, priorities are aligned, and capabilities (people, processes, data & technology) are optimised.

Supply looks at how a company’s proposition is supplied and delivered to customers. It works across sourcing, operations, customer delivery/ service to ensure the “right” service at the “right” cost while minimising waste. Supply-side optimisation usually leads to some of the biggest profit gains in the short term but needs to be balanced with longer term “Demand” opportunities.

Enablers cover all the supporting functions of Demand & Supply operations including finance, people, data, & technology. As a business grows, these functions become ever more important to ensure resources are allocated in the most efficient way – understanding drivers of profit, aligning competencies to roles, removing manual effort and providing rich insight through dynamic and insightful data.

Anaka Partners are regularly mandated to assist companies during leadership transition. We often deploy interim CEOs or Chief Transformation Officers to implement a management system that brings a step-change in results. Typically, this intervention is done as a small team with skillsets across Demand, Supply and Enabling functions. Each of the senior Anaka Partners team have had direct line experience in these C-Suite roles.

The holistic approach of Anaka Partners is at its strongest in the complex challenge of major integration or separation. Our partners have multiple experiences leading operational integrations of both mid-cap & global M&A transactions. We also have deep experience in reviewing situations such as “buy-and-build” PE-backed journeys where the operational integration was not prioritised and the combined entity may no longer be better than the sum of its parts. In these situations we are adept at simplifying the perceived complexity and restarting an accelerated integration. While internal fatigue and a frustrated feeling of missed potential often characterises the early days of these “failed” journeys, we still get the momentum, the positivity and the passion for the integration to overcome obstacles and be on the path to delivering the investment thesis.

Identifying the path to value is an essential element of the investment thesis. Once a deal has been done, a more in-depth assessment is needed on the key drivers of business growth and profitability to validate the hypotheses and build the investment case for change. Our rapid six-week diagnostic ensures that all internal data is examined as well as a thorough review of an organisation’s capability to deliver the change. This leads to a comprehensive business plan with measurable targets and milestones.

We support management teams and investors across the investment cycle to assess market attractiveness and identify opportunities to acquire (or divest) assets. We conduct thorough and unbiased due diligence on potential targets using a combination of analytical rigour and expert opinion to make sound decisions.

Commercial growth comes from driving sales and maximising net profit. We start by understanding the customer – who they are, their value to the business, why & how they buy. Often deep customer understanding is lacking, yet unlocking this is the key to serving customers better and to build margins. We use a combination of customer research and financial analysis to see where opportunities lie across a wide range of commercial levers: proposition, price, marketing, sales & service. We then test concepts in control groups to measure the impact before rolling out more widely.

Supply optimisation is perfecting the physical flow of work (product or service) through to the customer and the backwards flow of quality information. Anaka Partners has deep experience in implementing operational excellence, ‘lean’ production and world class sales & operational processes. We complement our skills at striving from smooth ‘flow’ with many years of cost optimisation on external spend through strategic sourcing.

Every organisation is perfectly designed and staffed to deliver the results it delivers. Conversely, a company whose performance is sub-par to its potential usually has a sub-optimal organisation design, an unproductive culture and/or wrong people in key roles. Using a holistic approach to building healthy organisations, underpinned by 50+ years of global research and industry-leading practice and not yet known to most mid-cap companies, ANAKA Partners works with the investors and the executive team to bring the company’s structure, culture and management strength to the next level.

Symptoms of every underperforming business are poor data quality, disagreement about KPI definitions and financial results ‘surprises’ being delivered in the middle of the month after they occurred.

Every organisation that does not care deeply about clean data, meaningful KPIs (of meaning to the front-line worker) and real-time value creation (profit) measurement knows that they do not care enough to do the labourous work to get it right first time.

Anaka Partners have the skills, knowledge and resilience to clean up all the data records, as this is the only way to eliminate the opacity that facilitiates poor decision making. We treat data as a precise science and are relentless to bring true insight from the data you didn’t know was always in the company.