How Atlantic Street Capital saves 10 hours a week on reporting alone

Founded in 2006, Atlantic Street Capital is an operationally focused private equity firm managing private investment funds that invest in lower middle market and middle market companies that can benefit from capital investments, operational resources, and support. Atlantic Street Capital’s Fund management team are hands-on investors who work closely with portfolio company management to unlock their business’ underlying value and help them succeed. They invest in middle market companies with between $4 million and $15 million of EBITDA.

The Challenge

For Atlantic Street Capital, a purpose-built deal and relationship management platform was critical to propel their business forward. Prior to deploying DealCloud, Atlantic Street Capital’s team of seven professionals largely tracked everything from deal sourcing to fundraising to business development using Excel. The team kept records in one Excel document for every year and needed a better solution for managing their data.

Atlantic Street Capital also used a generic CRM for relationship management but after years on the platform, found the technology did not satisfy the firm’s day-to-day business development needs. The Atlantic Street Capital team was not reaching its full potential at the time, which led them on the search for a purpose-built, verticallyspecific technology solution like DealCloud.

Implementation

DealCloud’s account management, implementation, and training teams worked hand-in-hand with Atlantic Street Capital to identify their needs and create an implementation structure. The DealCloud team focused on data cleansing and migration, platform configuration, and full team training to deliver a fully implemented solution in just two months.

Before working with DealCloud, much of our data was kept and maintained in Excel. This led to many manual processes and workflows that took hours out of our week that we could have spent elsewhere. DealCloud has allowed us to better collaborate as an organization, streamline mission-critical workflows, and use data and metrics to track and optimize our efforts.

GRANT MARCKS, HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, ATLANTIC STREET CAPITAL

The solution

Today, every component of Atlantic Street Capital’s business development function is fully integrated into the DealCloud platform. Essentially starting from “zero” with no meaningful internal operating systems or processes in place, Atlantic Street Capital used the migration to DealCloud as an opportunity to create new opportunities using DealCloud’s deal, relationship, and firm management capabilities. DealCloud’s platform was created specifically with the needs and challenges of private equity professionals in mind and has been configured to enable Atlantic Street Capital to successfully do all of the following:

  • Business Development: Atlantic Street Capital uses the DealCloud platform for both components of their business development strategy – Platform investments and add-ons for their portfolio companies. Nearly half of Atlantic Street’s add-ons sourced come from their networks (operating partners, advisors, etc.) and DealCloud enables the Atlantic Street Capital team to track and manage those deals and relationships in a more efficient and effective way.
  • Productivity Tracking: Atlantic Street’s Managing Partners are given real-time insight into what work is being done and by whom through DealCloud’s productivity and activity tracking tools.
  • Marketing and Communications: Using DealCloud’s integrated marketing tool, Dispatch, Atlantic Street Capital has been able to proactively distribute thoughtful and original content such as the firm’s 2019 Year-End Summary, industry insights, deal announcements, and general firm updates, creating meaningful opportunities for deeper relationships and engagement with their network.
  • Reporting: DealCloud’s reporting functionality has allowed Atlantic Street Capital to dynamically create custom reports including weekly automated deal sheets, pipeline reporting and prospecting, tearsheets, and fundraising pipeline reports, saving as much as 10 hours per week that can be re-allocated to other key activities.

Partnering for success

Working closely with DealCloud’s team of private equity experts, Atlantic Street Capital designed a solution and roll-out plan that enabled their team to focus on business development, productivity tracking, marketing, and fundraising.

For Atlantic Street Capital, success included:

  • Implementation and data migration services
  • Global user training through DealCloud University
  • Power User and Platform Manager Certification for key site administrators
  • Dedicated account management and client success teams
  • Enhanced data management and reporting strategies

Executive Summary

  • Created structured processes and increased team efficiency
  • 147 dashboards created
  • DealCloud University training completed by 4 users, with 50% of the team platform manager certified
  • Recently onboarded and began conducting marketing campaigns through DealCloud Dispatch, with several scheduled through the balance of 2020