Challenge:
With 13 companies in its portfolio, this private equity firm needed a way to bring their disparate data together in one place to improve visibility and governance.

Solution:
Equicapita uses Domo to track the success of its portfolio companies, in addition to helping those companies better run their businesses.  

Impact:
Equicapita reduced its complex manual reporting process, allowing it to spend more time digging into insights. 

Equicapita gains unmatched visibility into its investments with Domo.

With more than $300 million in assets under its management, private equity firm Equicapita is always on the lookout for new ways to maximize the value of the companies it owns. The firm specializes in acquisitions of financially-sound companies in the $5 million to $50 million range; big enough to create a long-term track record and economic moat, but small enough for Equicapita to add their expertise to take the companies to the next level. 

Equicapita uses Domo to not only track the success of its portfolio, but to help the companies under its umbrella work smarter using data.

“Domo helps us and them anticipate how we can make better business decisions by collaborating together using a single source of information.”

Bringing insights together.

Equicapita has 13 companies in its portfolio, giving the firm diversification across industries, sectors, and geographies. However, the diversity of the companies and the way that each measures success meant that each company delivered its reporting in significantly different formats. As a result, each company would spend about three days each month as part of its manual reporting process collecting data, normalizing it, consolidating it, and then creating reports for the board. 

“Because each company is so different, with its own established ERPs and processes, it doesn’t make sense to make a drastic change to their system landscape,” Ferket said. “That was our biggest driver to Domo; it lets us funnel all their data into a centralized instance that we can then automate for our reporting requirements.” 

The firm uses Domo at the head office level to consolidate the financial information of its different holdings. This helps Equicapita standardize the information it reviews so it can dig into the insights the numbers generate instead of trying to understand what the numbers mean.  

“We hold a monthly meeting where we go over the performance of each company. We use the Domo PowerPoint plugin to generate the presentation that each company manager uses, so they can immediately present data and we can ask deeper questions. Domo really brought the standardization we needed in order to make better decisions,” Ferket said.  

As a private equity firm, Equicapita must compete for the investment dollars it uses to fund its acquisitions, making Domo a crucial marketing tool. When pitching to investors, Equicapita shares a custom dashboard that shows non-sensitive information about its portfolio companies. This allows the firm to pitch investors using the data it has in Domo without worrying that prospective investors will gain access to proprietary business data.  

In addition, it allows the firm to show off the way they use Domo as a tool, giving investors more confidence.

Using domo to help build its businesses. 

In addition to using Domo to manage its portfolio and garner new investors, Equicapita gave each of the companies in its portfolio access to Domo so they can use data to run their own businesses. Each organization can use Domo in a way that makes sense for them, while ensuring that the data they create is useful to the larger organization.

“That can transcend more than just the financial requirements we have. It can be anything related to their operations, such as quality management, operations, business development, digital marketing, or anything that their leadership wants to focus on,” Ferket said. 

For example, one company in its portfolio had 13 branches that each use their own QuickBooks instance for accounting. Using Domo, the company was able to consolidate all that data together automatically, saving 3-4 days of work a month that its finance team used to spend manually consolidating finances.  

Another company used Domo to run a what-if analysis on whether it made financial sense to invest $500,000 in a new piece of machinery. By analyzing how the machine would impact everything from its lead time to its technician headcount to potential bottlenecks that can be created from increased efficiency in one part of an existing workflow, the company was able to integrate the machine in a way that helped increase earnings by 200%.