Spotlight on Portfolio Operations: Laith Kalamchi
As part of BC Partners’ latest series focused on operational excellence, we’re sitting down with members of our Portfolio Operations team to find out more about their expertise and how they work across BC Partners’ portfolio to drive value creation for our investors.
In this Q&A, we speak with Laith Kalamchi, Managing Director in the Portfolio Operations team at BC Partners. Laith shares how the BC Partners approach to portfolio engagement is reflective of the Firm’s culture and strategy.
Laith, thanks for taking the time to speak to us. Could you start by telling us about your role at BC Partners and experience before joining the firm?
Laith Kalamchi: Sure, I’m a member of the firm’s Portfolio Operations team and spend most of my time partnering with portfolio company leadership on what we call “Commercial Excellence.” Essentially, I work on driving topline growth and profitability in our portfolio companies.
I joined BC six years ago. My early career was in strategy consulting where I worked across a broad range of topics and industries. Over time, I began to focus on growth-oriented topics such as market entry, channel strategy, pricing, and salesforce effectiveness. After my time in consulting, I worked in Portfolio Operations for another large private equity firm, and in an executive role for a private equity-backed portfolio company. These experiences make me fortunate to bring the so-called trifecta of experience in consulting, operating, and private equity to my role at BC Partners. At this point, I have more than twenty years of experience, the majority of which has been in the private equity space.
How are you and the team working to maximise value across the portfolio?
Laith Kalamchi: BC Partners is an active owner with an owner-operator mentality and an operational approach to value creation. Our Portfolio Operations team enhances value creation by bringing deep expertise on topics repeatedly called upon within our portfolio, such as Commercial Excellence. Our deal teams are comprised of an integrated blend of our Investing and Operating colleagues. This allows us to bring our different but complementary skill sets to bear as we work to create value in the portfolio. We engage with portfolio company management as one Firm, not as separate Investing or Operating teams.
As such, I engage across the investment lifecycle from diligence, to hold, to exit. My work reflects that. For example, right now, I’m working on drafting a Value Creation Roadmap for a new deal, meeting daily with management teams of our portfolio companies, and preparing exit materials for one of our investments.
In our business, delivering impact is the only thing that ultimately matters. I’ve found that the successful execution of a strategy is typically more difficult than the development of the strategy itself. So, our role is to enable our management teams’ success in executing to deliver impact. We work side by side with management serving as a resource and trusted partner to achieve our shared objectives.
Can you share with us some highlights or examples of how you have supported portfolio companies?
Laith Kalamchi: As you can imagine, the Commercial Excellence mandate is broad, so my work with portfolio companies can either be shorter-term in nature, focused on one specific strategic initiative, or longer-term, with stewardship of the investment throughout our ownership period. Some examples include restructuring the salesforce of a technology business whose sales pipeline was declining and win-rate lagging; footprint expansion and site-level revenue growth in a healthcare business; and pricing strategy for a rapidly growing but immature service business.
These examples highlight businesses across various geographies and in different industries. As you can see, we are able to tailor our engagement to meet a diverse set of strategic needs within the portfolio.
Looking ahead, from your perspective, what do you view as the main trends driving how BC Partners will approach value creation in the next 5 – 10 years?
Laith Kalamchi: Our function has evolved significantly over time, and as the demands of our portfolio evolve it will continue to do so. While our founders were former operators, a Portfolio Operations function per se did not exist when BC was founded. The first iteration consisted of individuals working on a one-off basis, which then evolved into a formal team of generalists. We are now a team of specialists with dedicated areas of domain expertise. Personally, I expect the domain areas to evolve. We recently added a team member focused on Artificial Intelligence for example.
At BC Partners, value is created through daily portfolio company engagement, and the feedback we receive through this engagement informs the continual evolution of our approach. Returns will increasingly be dependent on our ability to drive organic growth and operational improvement. As such, the importance of Portfolio Operations will only grow over time in whatever form is required to provide the hands-on support and expertise to create value for our investors. +++