Accelerating Buy & Build Target Identification

If you are a shipowner, you need to keep your vessels, and their key systems, safe and compliant, no matter where they are in the world. Preferably, you’d like to achieve this by working with a single, trusted party, who is able to service multiple systems on board. 

This is the value proposition of Mr. Marine, a portfolio company of Netherlands-based private equity fund Committed Capital. Committed Capital acquired a majority stake in Mr. Marine in 2020 and has been implementing a buy & build strategy since, looking to strengthen the services portfolio and geographical coverage of the company. Currently, Mr. Marine operates a global platform for Testing, Inspection, Certification, and Compliancy (‘TICC’) services for crucial equipment on board of seagoing vessels. TICC services are provided for ship elevators, instruments and controls, ballast water treatments systems (“BWTS”), and fire and safety equipment such as life-saving appliances (“LSA”) and fire-fighting (“FFE”). 

How Committed Capital utilizes data-driven lead generation to accelerate buy & build strategies

Executing a buy & build strategy in a fragmented and global market like marine services requires deep market insights to be able to identify the right targets. There are thousands of companies across all the major marine hubs with different service models and technology focus areas. 

To speed up their targeting process Committed Capital and Mr. Marine contracted Venture IQ in a hybrid fixed-cost / success fee model to map out potential target companies based on specific criteria. Casting a wide net by automatically capturing data from publicly available industry sources and auto-enriching the resulting company profiles with relevant data, Venture IQ’s platform Catalist was able to efficiently screen, structure & score companies on custom criteria and filter-down to a target list of potential targets across all requested hubs and service areas. 

Efficiency gains through better data and insights

The data-driven approach chosen by Committed Capital allowed the investment team responsible for Mr Marine to filter and zoom-in on the most interesting players globally, and spend their time on outreach and initial negotiation with interested parties. Without the tooling and service provided by Venture IQ it would have taken much longer to get a complete picture of marine services providers and insights on which companies could be the most interesting. Once the dataset was created, the team was able to efficiently iterate and screen for additional marine services and geographical coverage to find companies in adjacent areas. 

All-in-all, in keeping with the efficient and high quality service that Mr. Marine provides to their clients, Venture IQ was happy to support Committed Capital and Mr. Marine’s expansion strategy in a similarly expedient manner. As for the results? We suggest you follow the announcements on Committed Capital and Mr. Marine’s websites to see how this plays out.