Offering

Transaction

Is your company looking to acquire growth companies and expand its business? Vertical is here to guide you through that journey. We have valuable expertise in the Nordic SME field and in understanding what startups and scaleups look for when selling equity and raising outside capital. 

When it’s time to invest or acquire, we help you find the right strategic partners and guide you through the process of designing and making deals. Vertical, with its track record of over 75 collaborations between corporate clients and growth companies, knows what it takes to do business with growing, agile companies. 

We know what works

Our experience in orchestrating deals between large corporations and growth companies spans over seven years. We see how lack of mutual values, poor expectation management, and incompatible ways of working are some of the most common aspects where otherwise sound and profitable partnerships and acquisitions go wrong. We have developed a holistic process for identifying these pitfalls in the lead-up to a deal and take pride in understanding both sides of an acquisition. 

Learn about our methods

Pre-acquisition

Before the deal phase, our team works with your organization to identify relevant industries, niches, and business cases to strategize the best scenarios for an acquisition. The pre-acquisition phase with Vertical consists of the following steps:

Scouting

To best understand a particular field or industry, we identify and analyze the companies operating in the space. We utilize tools and knowledge to identify targets not found in the newspaper headlines, with the main focus on Nordic SMEs. The scouting process with us continues via analysis of longlists, shortlists, and results in a handful of top prospects. We validate our results with the client throughout the process, ensuring the right needs are being met.

Cultural Due-Diligence

Vertical’s approach relies not only on understanding the traditional business and growth trajectories for target companies but also going beyond the numbers. Our Cultural Due-Diligence process is designed to unlock insights into how the target company operates and what it values. A cornerstone of our cultural due-diligence process is the Value Proposition Day where the meeting of client and target company is supplemented by Vertical with expert facilitation, analysis packages, and ready key questions. The day is a forum for our clients to start understanding the motives and incentives of the target company.

Joint Value Proposition

The following Joint Value Proposition process forges concrete goals and metrics to drive mutual understanding and mindset. Through a set of curated, target-oriented workshop-style meetings our clients are able to see past the acquisition together with the chosen target company and set goals that are later embedded into the deal structure.

Successful Acquisition For You Is Our Goal

While aligning pre-acquisition comprehension of functions and people leads to positive collaboration, we understand your business goals and strive to get the deal you want over the finish line. In our achievement of this, we will not hesitate to go the extra mile. Vertical utilizes additional expertise in the form of partners when required by the deal-making process, ensuring that the highest standards of required transaction processes are met.

Integration

Vertical’s collaboration experience plays a crucial role in the execution of a smooth transition from acquisition into coexistence with clearly defined KPIs and values for doing business as one entity. Our approach towards the integration process starts where the joint value proposition left off: aligned mutual goals. The management teams of both our client as well as of the target company are aware of the mutually mapped growth drivers and production parameters. We will facilitate the first sprints of your work together and make sure that the benefits of an acquisition are put into action, not only left on slides.

This is how we will proceed

Get in touch!

What are the next steps you need to take with your champion team? Based on your setup and needs we will pair you with our internal talents, who will plan your transaction path. We offer workshops, mappings, and team-trainings, as well as end-to-end collaboration project support. Whether you want to run a small pre-acquisition market mapping or a full-scale integration validation pilot — we’ve got tools to support you along the way.

More details?

Please get in touch with Eero Toppinen if you should have any questions or if you need more details.

Eero Toppinen

Transaction | Collaboration

eero@vertical.vc
+358 40 674 0000

Recent projects

A-lehdet

Rethinking business models

"The media industry has been struggling for years" sounds like a quote from ‘Captain Obvious’ — but while it may be common knowledge, potential solutions to the problem can be more obscure and unusual. That was definitely the case in the work that we conducted for one of Finland’s oldest publishing houses, A-lehdet.

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