Strategic Capital – Corporate Development

Nucleus Partners provides a comprehensive corporate development consulting service for early stage companies that will maximize and accelerate the growth of shareholder value.  We work transparently with our client’s management to support the acceleration of growth and market success.

Problem Statement

Companies emerging successfully from the startup phase often fail when entering mainstream markets due to faulty strategy or inadequate breadth of products or distribution channels required to meet customer needs.

Most companies that emerge successfully from the startup stage do not have an internal corporate development group that can adequately define and implement new strategic initiatives needed for continued growth and survival. Further, building an in-house group may be cost and time prohibitive.  In-house corporate development groups often lack the objectivity needed to recommend significant changes in strategy to the CEO.

Practice Overview

What we do -- Nucleus Partners offers its portfolio companies a complete operational development service utilizing its team of Entrepreneur Partners with the domain, planning, marketing, finance, sales, and operating expertise needed to develop and implement a strategy that will accelerate the growth of shareholder value and carry the company to its next inflection point. This service can be offered on a very cost effective basis for the portfolio companies. This is possible by utilizing the skills and experience of the Entrepreneur Partners. When retained by a portfolio companies, Nucleus will form a project team from its Entrepreneur Partner group with the relevant skills necessary to meet the portfolio company need. The group leader will draw in additional Partners as required for the success of the project.

How We Do It -- Nucleus Partners assists our portfolio companies by designing custom hands-on programs focused on accelerating growth. We do this through a five-phase corporate development program:

Strategic assessment and positioning

We thoroughly review your business plans, operations, models and strategy to assess your on-going operations and markets. Through interviews, planning reviews, our own network of market experts and our EP analysis, we can assess your business and make solid recommendations on where to focus your resources and energies.

Internal growth options

We work with your team to assess your growth opportunities to determine whether you have the resources, methodology and capabilities to attain those goals. We summarize strategy options including organic growth, market segment/geographical expansion, derivative product development and strategic partnering.

Our EPs can also assist portfolio companies with strategic partner, sales channel and customer introductions and development as appropriate.

In addition, we can offer an initial assessment of potential capital markets/funding strategies including recapitalization, splits, private equity, secondary offering, etc

Investor relations assessment

Because many of our EPs have run public companies, we can help you assess the current state of investor/shareholder relations and awareness including:

Review literature, presentations, press releases, external reports and investor relations programs.

Identify and assess investor relations strategy/positioning options within your industry

Review valuation scenarios considering overall industry landscape, structure and dynamics

External growth strategy

A key value of our program is to look for external growth opportunities. Our EPs and network can identify and assess external growth opportunities with :

Products and technologies complementary to your current solution set

Companies as acquisition targets that have complementary products, technologies, market position or sales channels.

We help you prioritize potential acquisition target lists based on mutually agreed criteria, as well as prepare detailed background information on your top priority acquisition targets.

Merger/acquisition and financing implementation

Because we are a venture capital firm, we can provide significant assistance at brokering deals, financing your acquisition plans and helping you integrate operations once an acquisition has closed.  Our EP team can assist in:

Structuring, negotiating and executing funding/capital markets strategy.

Structuring, negotiating and executing other business restructure or merger/acquisition transactions.

Why Nucleus?

The Entrepreneur Partners at Nucleus Partners represent 20 partners with more than 600 years of collective business experience at start-up, emerging and growth companies. We apply our “Wisdom of Masses” to collectively contribute to growth and opportunity. Our experience includes corporate/business development M&A, spinout, IPO and financing transactions with the biggest and best known companies in the technology industry. Most of us have been CEOs and/or other “C” –level executives, so we have lived through the challenges faced by emerging companies. Based on personal experience, we know what works and does not. Our veteran team of Entrepreneur Partners have run and participated on boards of public companies as well as advised private companies.

The Nucleus Entrepreneur Partners also maintain an active, wide network of senior management contacts in high technology and financial services industries including semiconductors, medical devices, healthcare, enterprise software, communications/networks, digital media, consumer, and transportation/energy.