Platform Companies: What They Are And How They’re Used

Published on: 05 April 2023 Last Updated on: 05 November 2024

Platform companies, also called platform acquisitions, are key steps in a private equity firm’s expansion into a new industry.

The firm will first target a large, established business in the industry. From there, it will strategically acquire multiple smaller businesses, using them to expand its reach within the industry.

Platform acquisitions don’t just benefit the private equity firm — they also have surprising benefits for owners of smaller companies. Here’s a quick primer on platform companies and how they work.

How Does a Platform Acquisition Work?

Breaking into a new industry can be tough, especially if you start by opening a new business. Private equity firms skip that step. Instead, a private equity firm will start by acquiring an established, successful business in the field.

When selecting a company to purchase, private equity firms generally look for a few characteristics:

Status as a Market Leader: For the best chance at success in the given industry, equity firms will typically target companies that stand out — even if it’s just within a certain geographical location or in a very specific market niche
A Strong Management Team: When equity firms acquire platform companies, they typically want to keep the existing higher-level employees to ensure the company’s continued success and improve the business practices of new acquisitions
Multiple Locations: A business with multiple locations has already expanded its reach, and equity firms can build on that with further acquisitions
Established Standard Operating Procedures: When expanding the platform company, the equity firm can simply apply these operating procedures to new acquisitions

After the purchase, the platform company serves as a kind of home base for the firm within the industry. The private equity firm will usually then expand that business through bolt-on purchases (also called roll-up purchases or roll-up acquisitions).

Bolt-on purchases are different from another kind of acquisition called a tuck-in acquisition. With a bolt-on acquisition, the newly purchased smaller company will usually keep its name and identity. With a tuck-in acquisition, the smaller company is completely absorbed into the larger platform company.

Why Would an Investment Firm Acquire a Platform Company?

When private equity companies purchase a platform company and begin to expand into a new industry, they aren’t doing so with the intent of keeping the company forever. Instead, platform acquisition is a long-game investment strategy. It takes a significant amount of time, but it can generate a massive profit.

In a nutshell, equity companies buy and expand platform companies in hopes of eventually selling the expanded company to an even larger investor. Selling the companies as a conglomerate is almost always more profitable than selling each one separately.

For example, suppose that a private equity company wants to break into the fitness industry. The company might start by purchasing a regional chain of gyms.

As it purchases other, smaller gyms, it will use the management expertise and existing operating procedures of the first acquisition to improve each of the smaller gyms. It will also invest money in smaller gyms to increase their value.

When the company finally sells the expanded network of gyms, it will have created a profitable business venture that runs smoothly. This type of purchase is an attractive one for larger investors, so the equity company will be able to turn a significant profit.

How Platform Companies Can Impact Business Owners

At first, the idea of a larger company buying up smaller companies might not sound that advantageous to owners of small businesses. However, as a platform expands and acquires multiple smaller companies, those companies can see some surprising benefits.

For one, platform companies will usually invest significant capital in the new company soon after purchase. After all, the whole point of the acquisition is to increase the total platform’s valuation.

But money isn’t the only investment that platform companies put into smaller companies. After the acquisition, the equity firm will continue to focus on growing the newly acquired business.

The newly purchased business will reap several benefits from the platform:

Experience in sales and marketing
Experienced professional management
Financial acumen
Standardized, organized operational procedures

In many cases, these smaller acquisitions retain their company name. That makes the acquisition more appealing to many small business owners, especially those who have built their businesses from the ground up.

In many cases, an acquisition ends up as a win-win situation: The platform company expands its reach and total value, and the smaller business receives valuable funding and mentorship.

Platform Companies Add Value

Being acquired by a platform company can transform a smaller business for the better. And for the platform company, each new acquisition has the potential to bring in new customers, expand the company’s market reach, and increase the value of the platform as a whole.

On its own, the acquisition of a single small business might not seem like much. But when a firm repeats that process many times over, the result is an expansive, highly organized company that multiplies its value over time.

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Arnab

Arnab is a professional blogger, having an enormous interest in writing blogs and other jones of calligraphies. In terms of his professional commitments, He carries out sharing sentient blogs.

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The Pulse Of Professionalism: Crafting A Reception Desk That Leaves A Lasting Impression

In today's business scene, your reception desk acts as a welcome point, which is initially what your customers view when they enter your organization. In this situation, you must choose a reception desk that's more than just a piece of furniture. Your organization's values, individuality, and ethos must reflect on your reception desk, which welcomes your potential customers. So, how will you craft a reception desk that leaves a lasting impression on your guests and potential customers? You will have to consider more than aesthetics when choosing a reception desk for your office. Setting the functionality along with the tone of your office reception desk makes it not only memorable but also creates an impression on its onlookers. So, if you wish to create an impression with a reception desk that aligns with your organization's aesthetics and serves its function, then craft a desk that seamlessly merges both form and function with aesthetics. Make the first touchpoint memorable in your office by designing a reception desk that balances both functionality and flair. In modern designed offices, the old simplistic designed desks no longer attract any attention. Instead, today's reception desk designs are architectural marvels created by merging innovation and intention. How To Crafting A Reception Desk That Leaves A Lasting Impression Here's how you can craft a reception desk that leaves a lasting impression on its onlookers. Functionality When deciding on which reception desk to pick for your office or organization, you should prioritize its purpose. If you want to leave a lasting impression on guests who enter your office, opt for a functional desk that meets the staff's and visitors' practical needs. Aesthetics can last you an impression only for some time until your staff or guests need to use the desk. So, choose a desk that is approachable and serves the purpose. Your desk must be designed to store essential items like stationery, documents, and electronic devices. Your organization desks should also be clutter-free and organized. First impressions are crucial, so if your reception desk is cluttered, it creates a negative impression on your guests. So, craft a functional reception desk that helps store necessary items without overcrowding the desk. Choose a reception desk that is easily approachable, which creates an impression of inclusivity. This helps give a welcoming impression to your visitors. Read More: Proven Strategies To Captivate Buyers And Sell Your Business Successfully Design Just like an aesthetic reception desk alone can't create a lasting impression on your guest. Functionality alone can't serve the purpose as well. So, you must choose a reception desk that is unique in its design. This will help elevate your reception look from ordinary to extraordinary. You will have to choose a reception desk that's not only functional but has a design that stands out. You can use a sophisticated designed reception desk with sleep marble countertops. Or a warm wood accent reception desk that exudes welcome and warmth to its onlookers. You can choose a well-lighted reception desk, which increases visibility for your guests and staff. Try creating an inviting atmosphere in your reception surrounding your reception desk. This helps create a captivating and inviting atmosphere for your guests. Several innovatively designed reception desks are available that are influenced by modern architectural marvels. These designs help your reception desk stand out to your guests, who marvel at the design of the desk. Several people who are artistically inclined will also show their appreciation for knowing more about the desk. So, choosing a desk based on functionality and creative design can help elevate your reception area. Layout Your reception desk layout is equally important when looking to make a lasting impression on your visitors. A good layout helps individuals move and get access to the reception smoothly without rushing during peak hours. You can include several service points in your reception to formulate check-ins and inquiries smoothly. Creating a well-thought-out design reception desk can help you avoid chaos. You can reduce wait time and enhance your visitor experience when you have a proper layout. You can also include advanced technologies within your reception areas like digital displays or interactive kiosks to modernize your space. These integrations are functional as valuable information and resources are provided to visitors in seconds. Incorporate Your Organization Essence However, the true essence of a standout reception desk lies in its ability to tell a story—to encapsulate the essence of the organization it represents. Whether through branding elements, artwork, or architectural features, the reception desk serves as a visual narrative, offering a glimpse into the company's identity and values. For instance, a tech startup may opt for a sleek, minimalist design, reflecting its innovative spirit, while a law firm might prefer a more traditional aesthetic, conveying professionalism and trustworthiness. Customizable If you are seeking to leave a lasting impression on your reception desk, go for a customized desk. Include your business logo and tagline when customizing your choice of reception desk to make it stand out. Creating a unique design reception desk that goes with your office aesthetic while being functional is captivating for your office's overall visual. So, you can collaborate with architects, designers, and craftsmen who help organizations create customized reception desks that are uniquely theirs. You can include your brand and vision to create your ultimate reception desk. Even in the age of remote work and virtual connectivity, you cannot overstate the importance of a physical workspace. Your office reception desk acts as a connection between the outside world and your business. So, investing in a customizable reception desk will only elevate your organization's impression to the outside world. Especially if you are planning to reopen your office doors post-pandemic, give your office a new look starting with a customized reception desk. This helps even capture your staff's attention towards a fresh new start at work. Reception helps build connections, which can result in lasting connectivity with a client. So investing in a customized reception desk is well worth it for creating a first and lasting impression. Conclusion So, design a reception desk that stands out to your guests at the organization as they enter your office. Create a lasting impression with a reception desk that balances functionality with aesthetics. You can create a space with a reception desk that fulfills your practical needs and captivates onlookers' imagination. A space that leaves anyone with a lasting impression as they enter your office. A reception desk that sets the pulse of professionalism at your organization while welcoming all who enter with open arms. Read Also: Choosing Between Shopify and Crafting Your Website: A Guide for 2024 How Automation Tools Are Transforming Digital Marketing? Unlocking Opportunities: How Does Leasing Expand Your Car Options?

The Importance of Writing Business Reports in College

A business report is an important document because it reveals specific information about the organization. Entrepreneurs write these reports with the aim of attracting investors to their organization. Business reports also keep employees aware of the goals of the organization as they strive to achieve them. As a student, you need to have a clear understanding of the operations of the real business environment. It beats logic to finish college yet you cannot write a business report. Remember you are preparing to work in the actual business environment. Therefore, you need to gain practical skills in addition to the theory that you learn in class. One of the critical practical sessions in college is to write business reports. Currently, most organizations are under pressure to enhance their reporting processes. As a student, you will be expected to undertake this responsibility once you get to the field. The information you provide has to be reliable and sufficient. Remember everyone will be looking for you to meet these requirements with a high level of precision. The best way out is to present your facts in the form of a business report. Most modern organizations rely on the finance department to assist in the decision-making process and offer critical support to the business. There is an increase in the demand for fast and transparent reporting and most finance practitioners aim towards minimizing the time they use in compiling data to provide high-quality information at a fast pace. However, they cannot meet this objective unless they have a deep understanding of the concept of business report writing. You need to gain these skills at the college level and then sharpen them once you go to the field. Here are some of the benefits of writing business reports in college. Business Reports Provide Students with Deeper Insights : Business reports have an integral role to play when it comes to the active management of organizations. The management team uses them to track progress and attain organizational goals. Business reports can also help managers in controlling business expenditure and increasing revenue. Analysis of business reports will help both students and managers gain useful insights into the prevailing business trends. This knowledge ultimately helps business practitioners to put in place effective strategies that enhance the overall performance of the organization. Managers normally review the business reports and check for any abnormalities. Students need to have these insights from the onset for them to become better managers in the future. There is a definite format for writing business reports. Students should learn this before they get into the field. You have to understand the various sections of a business report and the information to include in each paragraph. As students write a business report, they get to understand the importance of this document to the management. No one will have the time to teach you all this information while at work. It's important to write business reports in college so that you don’t struggle later in life. Reporting That is Aligned with the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of the Organization : It is meaningless to provide a report that is not aligned with the overall strategy of the entity. You cannot achieve this objective unless you practically engage in writing business reports in college. You should bore the KPIs in the mind during the reporting activity. The advantage of providing accurate business reports is that they offer decision support and assist incorporate strategies of the entity. These are some of the things that you need to learn in both practice and theory. Business reports that are aligned to the KPI’s of the organization help in the attainment of the organizational goals. There is no better way of learning these skills unless you do it practically. No wonder you will find most professors insisting that college students must write a business Help in Highlighting the Current Position of the Enterprise: Some business reports are crafted with the aim of highlighting a particular problem that the company has been going through. The reports should contain effective solutions that help in bringing the problem to an end. For instance, suppose an organization is planning to downsize, this decision will ultimately affect the employees. In this case, the business report has to state the position of the business and the reasons behind the downsizing. The report should suggest the strategies that the management team can adopt so that the downsizing does not have adverse effects on the employees. The best time to gain such skills is at the college level. Business Reports Help in the Adoption of the Right Marketing Strategy: Companies find business reports to be used when setting up their marketing strategies. If a company is targeting a particular section of consumers with the aim of entering a new market, it can give its report to an advertisement agency. The best time to learn to write such a business report is at college. The report will help the marketing agency to develop a successful and effective marketing strategy for the organization. Business Reports Assist in Decision Making: Finally, college students should learn the various approaches to making decisions. One of these techniques is writing business reports. An annual report can help investors, employees and customers get the true picture of the organization. The business report is a critical step in the decision-making process and college students should gain these skills. An accurate and high-quality report will help the organization to track its expenses, improve its operations and also set new goals. As you read the business report, you should be able to identify the bottlenecks and come up with the various strategies that you can use to eliminate them. In summary, business reports play a critical role in the day to day running of the organization. College students can’t gain these insights unless they learn how to write a professional business report online. Lecturers should give college students business report assignments from time to time so as to prepare them adequately for the job market. Read Also : Why Every Business Needs Digital Marketing Small Business Guide To Private Health Insurance Exchanges Get The Details On How Sferic Protect Can Benefit Your Business & Its Safety

Top DevOps Metrics in Development Companies

DevOps, though exclusively focused on the improvement of software development businesses’ operations, are often misunderstood, especially at the initial stage of their adoption. This concept means different things in different companies, primarily due to the distinctions in focus and various tools’ choices for solving specific business needs. But measuring the DevOps success is imperative for any business, as the large-scale transformation they require is usually expensive and long-term. So, how can you determine whether the project succeeded or not? To keep the progress under control, every company has its own comprehensive list of DevOps metrics to measure the success of its operations. Here we offer a detailed guide on choosing your metrics and making sense of them. Features of Actionable DevOps Metrics Overall, there are dozens of metrics experts recommend, but your company may need a specific set thereof. How to choose the ones that fit your organization the best? We advise focusing on the following characteristics and checking these points before including the metric in your checklist. i. Relevance When you put DevOps tools in use, you probably pursue a specific business goal or close a performance gap. Thus, your DevOps approach may differ from the one in another company, and your metrics for measuring success should also match the initially set goals. If your problem was a large number of errors, then the defect escape rate will be the number one metric of interest. If you struggled with deployment delays, then the deployment frequency is a metric to focus on, and so on. ii. Measurability There’s no sense in relying on abstract, subjective evaluations when assessing the impact of DevOps introduction in your company. Such measurements will be vague, giving no concrete data for analysis and further action. So, always choose parameters that have standardized values and can be re-measured over time. iii. Traceability When you want to measure something, you need to have a clear idea of what issue or parameter that metric points to. Otherwise, you won’t draw valuable conclusions even with accurate data in your hands. iv. Actionability What does the metric show to you? What problems can it highlight, and what improvements can it suggest? Every metric should be valuable for evidence-based decisions and strategic actions. v. Reliability The metric should be objective and out of the control of any team member. Otherwise, people in your team can easily manipulate the data or present their subjective views that distort or conceal the general perception of the situation. What Metrics Won’t Do? With the features of good metrics in mind, you should also learn a bit more about poor metric choices. This information can prevent DevOps beginners from relying on wrong or inaccurate data, which may lead to wrong, counter-productive decisions. So, bad DevOps metrics are usually: a. Beyond the DevOps mindset Make sure that you adopt the DevOps culture in its entirety to avoid non-DevOps metrics in performance measurement. Your values change, and the team’s performance is measured in entirely different terms. Thus, for instance, measuring compliance won’t help as it is not suitable for the DevOps development environment. b. Focused on competition inside the team Collaboration and competition often contradict each other. Thus, a company with a competitive culture rewarding winners and punishing losers will hardly succeed in the DevOps transition. If you understand this, don’t introduce metrics fostering competition in the team or between teams; it will kill all DevOps progress. c. Individually rewarding Appreciation of individual input is a metric irrelevant to DevOps, as the latter focuses on the communal outcome. So, even if a single person does the lion’s share of work in the team, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the best. The team’s added value to the end-user experience becomes the top priority when you want to integrate the DevOps approach. The Top 6 Metrics to Focus On #1 Lead Time Lead time is the key metric in most speed-focused businesses. It measures the amount of time your team needs to write and deploy the code. This metric is highly informative for future planning, showing how much time a coder will need to complete a specific task. #2 Frequency of Deployment Every development company focuses on more frequent code deployments, which is typically achieved by reducing the deployment size. The latter simplifies the testing and release operations. However, this metric is more complex than one might think. To get to the core of your deployment statistics, you need to understand the number of production and non-production deployments, factor in the number of deployments to QA checks before the final release. Once these metrics are collected and analyzed in a union, you will understand how this metric affects your defect escape rates. #3 Defect Escape Rate The QA check at the pre-production stage is an excellent filter for ensuring that defective code doesn’t get to production. However, companies focused on fast delivery often skip the QA stage and launch poorly working code without proper testing. The defect escape rate metric will give you an idea of how many defective deployments are there; it is calculated by dividing the total number of deployments by the number of defective ones identified at the QA stage. #4 Error Rates Unfortunately, errors are unavoidable in the software development world. Still, you can derive tons of valuable data from analyzing your errors. Identify their types, the stage at which they occur most frequently, and look for spikes in error rates. These metrics will help you spot systemic problems and oust them to achieve sizable performance improvements. #5 Mean time to detection (MTTD) Errors can go unnoticed for a certain period, and the longer that period is, the greater risks they pose. Thus, it would be best to keep the MTTD metric under tight control to minimize the time for error detection and correction. Otherwise, your system may suffer downtime or expose its critical vulnerabilities, which is very risky. Always Measure Your Progress As you can see, DevOps can turn into a concrete and measurable issue if you use proper metrics for its assessment. Invest time and effort into picking the right metrics for your business, even if you decide to get a devops automation service. In this way, you will always be in complete control of your operations, introducing adjustments and corrections where necessary. Read Also: Lucrative Business Ideas to start Near Water Bodies 5 Factors To Consider When Hiring A Branding Expert For Your Business What Really Matters When Choosing a Domain Name for Your Business How You Can Grow Your Small Business By Taking Help From Crypto

Platform Companies: What They Are And How They’re Used

How Does a Platform Acquisition Work?

Why Would an Investment Firm Acquire a Platform Company?

How Platform Companies Can Impact Business Owners

Platform Companies Add Value

Who Should Consider Using White-label Link Building Services?

How Do Iot Devices Improve Warehouse Management?

Arnab

Arnab is a professional blogger, having an enormous interest in writing blogs and other jones of calligraphies. In terms of his professional commitments, He carries out sharing sentient blogs.

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Platform Companies: What They Are And How They’re Used

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Who Should Consider Using White-label Link Building Services?

How Do Iot Devices Improve Warehouse Management?

Arnab is a professional blogger, having an enormous interest in writing blogs and other jones of calligraphies. In terms of his professional commitments, He carries out sharing sentient blogs.

Leave a Reply

Popular

Follow Us

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