Accelerating Growth

Strategy

In many cases, the partner companies we back seek help around a wide range of raw strategy issues. This may include competitive assessments, market entry strategies, pricing work, organizational construct issues, compensation questions and scalability challenges amongst others. We work closely with our portfolio companies to provide thoughtful analysis and perspective across a wide range of opportunities. When we formed our various healthcare provider platforms in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt we laid the strategy ground work for creating these countries' largest hospital and care networks through a buy and build executed over several years backing the management teams in each of these markets and supported by a strategic framework developed before the initial investment and refined over time. In our journey to back what became one of the largest insurance providers in Africa, we worked at the board level with management to develop the market entry strategies for over ten countries during our investment period.

Leadership and Talent

We have demonstrated across many investments our strength in improving leadership and organizational effectiveness across the investment lifecycle, including building and growing high-performance management teams and boards, in addition to aligning organizational structure, incentivization and culture with the business strategy. When we started the journey of building the largest independent hospital networks in Egypt and Tunisia, we had to also build management teams and boards in both countries that could help us execute our vision, at a time when independent hospital networks did not exist in either country, private hospitals were owned mainly by doctor shareholders and the sector was not institutionalized. We faced the same challenge when we started the journey to build Egypt's largest private university group, at a time when private universities were owned by local families with little institutionalizing. We always grant ownership stakes in our partner companies to employees to encourage productivity and alignment.

Brand Transformation

We have worked with a number of our partner companies to help them think strategically about their brand and how to leverage this and extend it as part of the value creation journey to ultimately gain a more aligned, integrated, and more valuable company. We helped the founders of Moulin D'Or take a small artisan confectionary brand and scale it to be one of the largest brands in the region in its category by investing in strategic marketing initiatives backed by a solid consumer research foundation. We supported our partner company Lilas in its transformation from a pure paper and diapers company to a diversified fast moving consumer goods platform, leveraging the strength and affinity of the Lilas brand into new adjacent categories with the same target consumer. We work closely with each of our partner companies to evaluate the right size and type of the selling organization for going to market. For example we supported Cleopatra Hospitals Group in their doctor sales team creation and goal setting to ensure operational effectiveness and maximizing the return on their investments in the sales and marketing functions.

Data Analytics

We work with our partner companies to gather and use data as a strategic and operational lever, implementing fit for purpose management information systems and enterprise resource planning tools. In Aziza, our discount retailer partner company, we leveraged customer analytics to design a targeted approach for promotions and marketing to improve return on marketing expenditure and improve customer yield. At our healthcare businesses, we are leveraging historic patient data to help improve outcomes. Our partner company Cleopatra Hospitals Group is working with Novartis on leveraging patient data for the early diagnosis and treatment of patients with atherosclerosis of the heart and blood vessels. At our healthcare diagnostics partner company we worked with external providers on a data cleansing and analytics project to tailor services for chronic patients for early detection and testing reminders.

Supply Chain

We support our partner companies by helping them uncover and deliver step-change improvement in EBITDA and cashflow generation through rigorous analysis and operational process improvement. We ensure that we appoint experienced financial practitioners at the audit committees of our partner companies to ensure support and oversight. In addition, for disciplined program management of transformation initiatives, we regularly set up a project management office at the partner company level which owns the transformation initiatives identified by the leadership team and board and oversees the execution and value delivery - we have supported our partner company Oncologie et Diagnostic du Maroc on its transformation journey by building out the inhouse project management team early on to help deliver the multitude of projects on its value creation path. Leveraging our food retail experience in Egypt, we were able to support MaxAB to extract working capital efficiencies with their suppliers and manufacturers leading to cashflow optimization to fund the company's accelerated growth trajectory.