A company is only as good as its talent, but identifying talent gaps and then recruiting to fill those gaps is a significant challenge for business owners.

Many investors will pay lip service to the importance of human capital, but may not have an established process nor a dedicated team in place to top-grade management in a way that meaningfully helps businesses grow.

At Boyne Capital, we hope that our performance in this area will speak for itself. In the last two years, we’ve successfully placed 39 management roles in our various portfolio companies.

But this isn’t just hiring for hiring’s sake. Here is our approach to top-grading human capital within the companies we partner with.

Evaluating Human Capital Gaps Early in the Relationship

Our process for evaluating an organization’s innate talent potential begins before even closing a deal: during the due diligence phase.

This process involves a comprehensive review of the current organizational setup against its future objectives and the necessary resources to achieve these goals. Often, this deep dive unravels areas where the current team, despite its best efforts, struggles to match the pace of the company’s evolution.

The solution? Typically these gaps require new strategic additions across pivotal departments. Foremost among those departments is the finance & accounting function.

The Importance of Good Finance & Accounting

Entrepreneurs often wear multiple hats, so they’ll have hands-on experience in the core operational areas of the business such as product development, sales and marketing, and more.

Realistically though, finance & accounting is often an area where founders fall short. These are complicated disciplines, and visionary leaders aren’t always well equipped to handle the intricacies of managerial accounting.

For this reason, many founders will lean on an outsourced CPA to manage their books—which isn’t necessarily bad, but that individual typically can’t give their full attention to understanding the nuances of your business. In other words, they won’t be able to lend the insight and transparency that a well-functioning finance team can provide to executives to make decisions that drive growth and profitability.

Which is exactly why Boyne places such a strong emphasis on sourcing and top-grading finance & accounting talent. In the last two years, Boyne has successfully added 17 finance and accounting roles across its portfolio.

Is Sourcing New Talent Hard and/or Expensive?

Management teams are usually already stretched to capacity. While the finance function is usually the most common blind spot, we have worked with owners and founders to help them fill talent gaps in HR, IT, marketing, sales, and technology amongst others. Sourcing candidates, reading resumes, interviewing prospects, and proctoring assessments all take time executives do not have.

On top of that, the fees related to traditional recruiting arrangements can also be prohibitive to conducting a meaningful search.

For these reasons, the founders we partner with are pleased to hear that Boyne Capital has an in-house team (for which we do not charge any fees) to manage the search process. Our approach is to craft a comprehensive staffing blueprint, then we leverage our team of seasoned operations and recruiting veterans to launch and carry out the search.

As a result, the CEO or COO is free from managing this initiative, which typically entails reviewing hundreds of resumes, conducting dozens of interviews, and finally presenting a limited number of Boyne-vetted candidates to the Company. This removes the top of the funnel candidates from management’s plate, enabling an efficient and targeted decision process among a few viable candidates.

Is Boyne Looking to Replace Key Management?

Boyne’s objective is never to sideline the original stakeholders who have grown the company to where it is today. Boyne likes to invest in great companies, and those companies only became great because of the people operating them.

There may be scenarios where augmenting or transitioning existing management makes the most sense for the business. When that is the case, we strive to be transparent and collaborative about those changes, highlighting them where possible during the due diligence phase to avoid any confusion later down the road.

Providing More than Money

From our vantage point, an investment in a founder’s company means more than just an infusion of capital. These are partnerships enriched with expertise, resources, and insights, aiming to position every business for a trajectory of sustainable success.

If you want to learn more about some of the other capabilities we bring to the table as a partner, check out our Perspectives page.