How The Big Four Use BeauhurstAdvise to Find Fast-Growth Companies at the Right Stage
‘Beauhurst is a game changer. They get the fast-growth scaleup market better than anyone else in the UK.’
The Big Four are large, global organisations offering professional services, including audit, tax, consulting, corporate finance, and legal. Partners at such firms offer advice and are relied on for their expertise and market knowledge.
- Industry
Advisory services
- Location
UK-wide
- Employees
14k+
The Challenge
Our customer explained that the greatest challenge within the fast-growth market for big accountancy firms is identifying the hot fast-growth businesses of the future, at the right stage.
‘How do we use our expertise and skills to identify who the next really exciting businesses are? The real challenge is that there are so many fast-growth companies around. It can be at times like kissing frogs—if you’re not strategic about this, you can interact with a lot of the wrong ones which can be a poor cost on investment.
‘Everybody will pile in on series C and D funding etc., but you’ve got to be really specialised to pick the early stage winners—that one you think has serious legs. Part of our business model is to be working with the clients of the future. To do that, you’ve got to be versatile and skilled at picking businesses at that crucial right stage. That’s what will make a difference, and what can be a major challenge across the UK for this sector.
‘I think all of the big accountancy firms and financial services, in general, are identifying that some of the more routine, larger corporate clients are being diversified out of their sectors where new, emerging scaleups are replacing them—very, very quickly. We’ve seen that in the fintech world, for instance.’
We also discussed how they had a very resource and people-intensive process, with unreliable results, until they started to use the Beauhurst platform.
"We needed a data-driven model that would support us to whittle down the companies we really wanted to interact with."
‘Before using the Beauhurst platform, we were trying to interact with these fast-growth scaleups once they’d hit certain kinds of metrics. Ultimately, we needed to get in there earlier. There are just too many fast-growth businesses, especially in London and the South East, and we just didn’t have enough resources to tackle them all. We needed a data-driven model that would support us to whittle down the companies we really wanted to interact with.
‘We had built entire teams of business development people to source these companies, but there was a very slim chance of identifying the right scaleup through that process. There just wasn’t enough data at hand to really execute. Basically, it was people-driven, as opposed to technology-driven, and it just wasn’t effective.’
The Solution
By utilising the Beauhurst platform, our customer was able to speed up the sales cycle by helping them identify the right companies at the right time.
‘Beauhurst is the leader in the market when it comes to data for fast-growth businesses, and private businesses in general. I use Beauhurst a lot for that type of data. The datasets themselves and the versatility of the technology are supported by the team who really embedded themselves to understand what we were trying to achieve.
‘That’s been a major differentiator for us, and ultimately, led to the national roll-out of Beahurst across the firm. We’ve now got a large number of people using Beauhurst, and it’s speeding up our sales cycle by allowing us to identify the right businesses at the right time.
‘To give you an example, we can easily end up with fast-growth scaleups paying us substantial fees in a short space of time as they grow by using Beauhurst. So for us, it’s a game-changer. There’s so much more we’ve still got to do with it and that we can do. And that’s where it gets interesting with the team at Beauhurst—the possibilities.
‘We use Beauhurst to set triggers that inform us on a daily and weekly basis. When a company has hit those triggers, we can then identify the names of the businesses we can sell our services to. We can then be quite versatile and agile in reaching out to those companies. By aligning Beauhurst data with our triggers, we get real-time information as to who’s hit those triggers on a daily basis.
"Working with the Head of Enterprise Accounts, Pravish Patel, has been exceptional."
‘Working with the Head of Enterprise Accounts, Pravish Patel, has been exceptional. It really is as simple as that. The time he’s spent with us to understand our business and our concerns has been game-changing. That’s led me to be more comfortable with allowing Beauhurst to interact with a wide variety of people within the business, and we continue to do so. They really want to help us over the longer term, as opposed to just a one-off supplier relationship. It feels very much like a partnership. I know Beauhurst are here supporting us with some of our strategic concerns and challenges. Pravish is particularly valuable as he understands our strategy and what we are trying to achieve, and he brings brilliant ideas to the table. He is very much intertwined with our business now at the highest levels.’