Cultivating success: Lessons from female leadership

Inflexion recently hosted its second annual Women in Business event bringing female leaders from across its network together to discuss the challenges and opportunities of growing businesses today. We were pleased to welcome Gabrielle Worrall, Vice President at Houlihan Lokey, as our moderator. 

What is the best way to enter a new market?

Karolina Tallar, Global CFO at CMSPI: The first thing to accept is that you’ll make mistakes along the way. Before I joined the company, CMSPI had tried to expand in a new global market by hiring someone there, but that didn’t work. So, we sent a few of our best people from the UK over instead. Little things matter, like how quickly you can get there and what the time difference is. You’ll not start with a full team but rather some core roles supported by HQ, and it’s important to balance all this. Partners are also crucial support – legal for employment law, accounting, recruiting etc. Really use them to help make decisions and don’t be afraid to change providers if their support falls short. Lastly, just because it’s a country where they speak the same language doesn’t mean it’s the same culture. For example, in the US, people value health benefits more than pensions, which is big in the UK. Partnering with experts can help navigate these nuances.

Claire Farley, Chief Product Officer at aosphere: The US is the biggest legal market in the world, and we absolutely want to be there. We’ve done okay from London, and around a third of our clients are there, though our revenue lags slightly. Would we do a lot better if we had a sales team there? In a post-Covid world, can we mostly do that from London? We don’t know the answer at the moment.

Toria Walters Chief People Officer at ANS Group: We acquired a small business which really helped us build our UK  talent, capability, and growth in customers. We focus on enterprise customers, and this brought us a different size and type of client. It also brought a number of excellent people to fill some gaps and took us into a new market as they had a team established in India. We had already been considering international expansion, and this was great for that. It’s had HR and finance colleagues– it’s been a very quick way to establish ourselves in a different country and embrace a new opportunity in a big market.

How do we get systems and infrastructure in place for growth?

Claire: Aosphere is a carve-out from a massive law firm and has around 50 people, previously part of a 5,000-strong business. The carve-out process and learning to stand on our own two feet has taken up a lot of time in the first few months. Things like finance, tax, payroll, cyber, and business continuity are all essential – you don’t realise you need them until you lose them. It’s the ‘day 2’ of the carve-out and needs to be sorted before we sever ties with our former parent, even if it’s not outright value creation. We need to consider what kind of infrastructure we need, build capacity in some areas, and rein in others; it’s about finding the right path around ‘day 2’ and then thinking about the future on ‘day 3’.

The second point is data. We love the customer insights we get from click-based analytics, but beyond that, how can we emerge from siloes and work effectively across functions to systematically capture and action customer feedback? On data and analytics, it’s important to engage in old-fashioned customer listening. We need to really listen and get better at hearing them, including getting comfortable with big pauses as we know it encourages them to talk more.

How can you establish a positive post-merger culture?

Toria: Bringing cultures together is tricky. It involves trying to merge brilliant people who have different histories and journeys. High-performing teams play and win together, and it’s about a team connected and aligned by leadership. Picking the right people is important: who are the promoters and cultural ambassadors? Initially with ANS Group, it was like a wedding, with people divided by family, and now it’s great to see everyone working together as true team mates. Once you create a great culture, you have to protect it. When we hire now, we consider whether they’re a good cultural fit and if they’ll add value and enhance it.

How do you design the right M&A strategy?

Claire: We are early on our journey with M&A. We are a subscription data business rather than a time-based law firm and could move into the customisation of generic information so clients can store it. We found it helpful in the early stages to agree on what we are and are-not and translate that into what would make good M&A targets. For us now, it’s businesses creating premium-quality data with trusting customers. Our core business model is to create one product and sell to many, and we don’t want anything that complicates that.

How can you maintain entrepreneurial culture alongside growth?

Karolina: There’s less appetite for risk as you get larger because the impact is greater. Inflexion has enabled us to invest in a platform where we process customers’ data, giving CMSPI the space and framework to realise what would work for us. Additionally, people who thrive in an entrepreneurial environment aren’t necessarily the same in a larger business. It’s about trying to find people who’ve succeeded in both environments as they’ll have the experience as you scale your business. We’re still figuring it out.

How can teams cope with change management?

Claire: People have been the key thing for us to get right. If you get that sorted – and it’s a big if – then everything else is easy. Many of our staff had worked for a massive global prestigious law firm, many for decades, and product teams were lawyers who professionally identified as being with A&O, so moving away from the mothership was something to handle carefully. We also had lots of interims helping us with tax and finance, etc., so we were moving away and had a lot of interims. It all contributed to change anxiety. The key is clearly communication, and it takes time and thought. We are realising that it is an absolutely key area to get right.

For 25 years Inflexion has been supporting mid-market companies to grow faster. The ambition of the teams we back combined with our experience means that on average our portfolio companies grow c.20% topline per year and we double headcount during the investment period. These impressive numbers are achieved through strong sector expertise and a best-in-class in-house value acceleration team comprising dedicated teams covering Digital, M&A, International, Talent, Commercial and ESG.