Furze Product Update: August 26

Written By Robert Read

Summer is a time for rest, sun and getting ready for the busier periods of the Autumn. Firehills has been no different to most there. But what we have been planning is a much bigger and noisier period where we get Furze better known in the market. We’ll be clogging up your algorithms across your channels very soon! Expect more LinkedIn content, email campaigns and invites to panels.

Stepping back to go forward, faster….

We’ve been using the summer period to do a full roadmap review, including bringing in external review resource to oversee how we’ve built our technology and are we on track to deliver its value to our customers. We’ve always said that we can’t live in an ivory tower at Firehills, whilst we have our beliefs and passions these can’t override that we build something that customers value more than ourselves.

In September we’ll be positioned with further resource, strategy and structure to run hard at the next phase and getting ourselves to a fully baked v1 product.

We’ll look forward to sharing more about the long term plans in future updates.

Building our first artifact, our “Growth Assessment”

As part of our product update series we’ve covered the following:

This has led us to step back and create a new artifact which we call a Growth Assessment.

The purpose of the assessment is to test the claims made by an Investment Memorandum. An Investment Memorandum (or IM) is a confidential document shared with investors of different types to bring in cash to funds for an organisation looking to raise. Or used by an organisation looking to put themselves up for sale.

This document is the start of the beauty parade and often the first asset which is qualified by an investor looking how to invest their cash.

But there are issues with these:

  • In many cases PE houses and Investors see way too many of these at a time and there isn’t enough bandwidth to assess them all at speed.

  • All of the IMs play back a story of growth and tell investors this is the best opportunity in the market

  • The claims in them are often very difficult to review, or involve lots of human research which is at a cost of time and speed

  • Within these IMs there are undiscovered strong investment cases, but they get overlooked in favour of what those PE houses or Investors prefer to invest in. Sticking to what they know. Rather than what will get them the best multiple.

This is where Furze brings insights, using data to test the claims of the Investment Memorandum

We’ve structured the growth assessment around 4 areas of data

  • What are the asset’s capabilities and are they unique?

  • Who is in your market, who are your next nearest peers and how does the asset compare against those peers?

  • What are the relationships behind the market, where does the asset sit across those? Are they in a place of leverage or sitting outside the bulk?

  • What are the economics around this asset, are they likely to be getting a tailwind or a headwind?

This builds towards testing the claims of growth. We pick out 6 claims which we use our data to test against. Can they hit their revenue and multiple claims? Or is it just all smoke and mirrors?

Here is an example of those claims which we made for the organisation Jellycat. A UK ltd company going through tremendous growth right now.

If this has caught your attention and you want to get a FREE growth assessment from Firehills then contact rob@firehills.io

Last but by no means least. We sadly had to say goodbye to Mikey, our senior developer, as he moved on to an opportunity for a passion project and full-time role doing something he loves. We’re grateful to him and wish him nothing but the best.

All the best from the Firehills team for the rest of the summer

Rob

Robert Read
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Furze Product Update: July 26