2024
Year in Review
The Highlights
4
New Platform Investments
3
Add-On Acquisitions
16
Executives hired across the Portfolio
3
New APG Team Members; 5 Internal Promotions
New Partner Companies
Strategic Add-On Acquisitions
Value Creation
We look to partner with companies that have built strong foundations. Together with management teams and founders, we continue to build excellence across all functions and aspects of the business. The Q Process and our experienced Operations Group are key resources in our partnership model.
We are proud to share two case studies of projects led by our Operations Group.
Case Study 1
Project Generator
Go-To-Market Performance
The Need:
The Company was having trouble meeting bookings targets, which was making it difficult for the Company to meet revenue targets. In short, the Company wasn’t winning enough work.
Our Assessment:
The Company was depending too much on operations personnel to identify and win work without the proper compensation plans, pipeline rigor, and training.
The sales team was not focused on the right business opportunities, and therefore was not finding enough project opportunities and losing too many of the opportunities they did find.
What We Did:
We launched a multi-phased rebuild of the Company’s go-to-market activities.
- We created a Sales Excellence Playbook, which established the Company’s “Way of Selling” across the Company’s seven component parts
- We built a Management Performance System to measure performance of all people involved in selling, which involved:
- CRM improvements to reinforce the new Company Way
- Compensation plan changes to reinforce the behaviors we value
- Tightened integration between pipeline and resource planning
- Measuring results better – through traditional metrics and new activity-based metrics
- After testing and refining our rebuild efforts with prototype Company branches, we rolled our initiatives out more broadly across the Company
The Results:
Positive, measurable results across all areas where the roll-out took place. Over a period of six months in one region alone:
- Sales pipeline grew by 97%
- Average project size grew 59%
- Most branches overachieved 2024 revenue targets despite originally forecast revenue challenges
- The two branches with the longest tenure in the program exceeded 2024 revenue targets by 13% and 6%. Many of the branch managers will receive a bonus payment for overachieving budgeted revenue targets in the first year of the program
Case Study 2
Project Lean
Operational Excellence
The Need:
The Company needed to integrate its various businesses and locations operationally to manage safety and quality, and improve output, and productivity.
Our Assessment:
The Company experienced growth from one location and one business to 12 businesses and 19 locations (with 800+ people) over an 18-month period and needed a lean transformation to integrate and accelerate.
What We Did:
To drive this lean transformation, we focused on three parallel initiatives:
- Implementation of daily management metrics and standards
- Daily standups within the production locations
- Weekly dashboards to provide a consolidated view of key metrics
- Weekly cadence of Site Managers and regional managers to review progress and problem solve Execution of improvement events (Kaizens) at each location to implement lean
- Every location executed at least one multi-day Kaizen event with the involvement of front-line workers to implement waste reduction tools
- Leadership development across site managers, regional managers, and executive managers
- Through the Kaizen events, leaders learned about lean tools and problem solving with the scientific method
- Key leaders learned how to plan and lead Kaizens and internalized the continuous improvement process
The Results:
Integrated and stabilized operations across the business. Outcomes included:
- Stabilized safety trends and reduced workers comp costs
- Increased output capacity by 15-20% to support organic growth
- Improved labor efficiency to offset COLA inflation
- Set the foundation for 10% organic growth in 2025
- Started a culture of continuous improvement at all levels
Team
We are excited by our team’s growth and development and ended 2024 with 25 American Pacific team members.
In September, Victoria Tucker joined as a Managing Director, Portfolio Operations focused on talent management. Victoria complements our existing team of four Managing Director-level operating partners, who collectively drive transformation across our portfolio companies in five critical areas: finance, technology, operations, go-to-market, and talent.
About
American Pacific Group is a San Francisco Bay Area-based private equity firm with $1.2 billion of capital under management and fourteen portfolio companies. Together with management teams, American Pacific Group seeks to drive sustainable growth in its portfolio companies by leveraging in-house operating partners and the “Q Process,” a proprietary and tested approach to value creation.
Contacts
Lauren Glazebrook
Managing Director and Head of Business Development
