Serent Capital

Founded in 2008, Serent Capital is a leading lower-middle market private equity firm focused on investing in high growth service and technology businesses. Our operating model is distinct in its focus on business building. We strive to be an involved, value-added investor, capable of providing significant operational and strategic support to our portfolio company CEOs on the most critical issues that they face as their companies scale.

Serent Capital’s ability to assist its companies is based on its principals’ experience as CEOs, strategic advisers, and Board Members, and a deep network of formal and informal advisors.

Our mission is to deliver extraordinary returns by partnering with outstanding executive teams to grow exceptional businesses. Our success in this mission comes from our persistent adherence to our values.

Created by founders, for founders

When you partner with an investor, you’re looking for a partner with the right values, working style, and personality to build an amazing relationship. Serent was created by experienced founders and operators to offer growing companies the guidance we wished we’d had. With Serent, you can partner with experts who have been there – so we can find opportunities together that will help you scale your business faster.

Purpose-driven partnership

Imagine the difference it could make to your business if you could rely on top-tier industry experts to guide you through planning your pricing structure or hiring your head of marketing. With Serent, that’s exactly what you get. With everything we do, we strive for collaborative decision making. You can always expect an honest conversation, knowing we’re working toward what’s best for your business.

More than financial partners

Working with experts is the best way to get better, faster. That’s why we invest in hiring the seasoned pros on our Growth Team – and offer their guidance to you without consulting fees. Whether you’re developing new marketing channels, expanding your team, or rolling out a new service, we’ll connect you with the right people to provide support through every step of the process.

Our values

• Performance: Demanding of excellence, unyielding in the search for truth, upholding the obligation to dissent, disciplined.
• Partnership: Trust, support, and respect – both internally and with our portfolio executive teams and employees. Our portfolio companies come first, Firm second, self third.
• Development: High expectations, invest in the individual, reap the rewards as a firm.
• Entrepreneurship: Valued in our firm, in our professionals, in our portfolio companies and their leadership.
• Principled: Fiercely protective of our reputation for professionalism and integrity, with everyone in our universe: executives, employees, intermediaries, investors, service providers.

Investment focus & criteria

We invest significant time and resources researching attractive industry segments. As a result, we can quickly assess whether we are interested in investigating a business further. This often takes place within 72 hours. If we are interested, we are able to leverage our research and move quickly to complete a transaction.

Serent invests in great businesses with exciting growth prospects. Our investment approach is to identify sectors with robust growth, and then to invest significant time and resources researching those sectors to identify attractive business models. We focus predominantly on services businesses, particularly ones with moderate to light capital intensity, requiring limited capital expenditures. We also look for companies at key inflection points, where they can benefit from our experience and expertise in business building.

• GROWING SECTORS: We like businesses that operate in sectors that are undergoing significant change, with dynamics that create or expand a market opportunity beyond what has been available historically. Examples include sectors that are benefiting from strong demographic trends, from shifting distribution, sourcing, or staffing models, or from technology enablement.
• SCALABLE BUSINESS MODELS: We like emerging new businesses that have developed a “secret sauce” in the form of capabilities, resources, proprietary content/information, or other types of intellectual property. Typically, this secret sauce is delivered in the form of a service and has subscription or recurring revenue. These services benefit from increasing scale, which helps establish a sustainable and defensible market position.
• OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD BUSINESSES: We prefer to invest in companies that will benefit from the experience and expertise of Serent’s principals in business building. We believe that by partnering together, we can build great companies and earn great returns.

We are open to buying businesses where an owner may not want an active role going forward, and we are very comfortable working with those owners and companies to ensure a smooth and successful transition for all parties.

SIZE

Serent Capital typically invests from $20 million to $200 million in B2B software companies with a strong product market fit and 30%+ Net Promoter Score (NPS).

In general, the companies in which we invest have the following characteristics:

• REVENUE: We are comfortable with a range of annual recurring revenues, from $5 million (or a path to $5 million) to $100 million
• GROWTH: We focus on growing businesses and look for annual growth from 20-1000%
• PROFITABILITY: We look for businesses that are profitable or have a path to profitability

STRUCTURE

We make investments of the following types:

• RECAPITALIZATIONS: We provide liquidity for entrepreneurs looking to sell a majority or minority stake in their businesses, while allowing them either to retain operational control or to bring in a new management team.
• BUYOUTS: Through a highly collaborative process, we are able to develop thoughtful and successful exit strategies for business owners. Our versatile approach allows us to partner with existing management teams or to engage new management if needed.
• GROWTH CAPITAL: We bring our business building experience and financial capital to bear to make significant investments that accelerate growth. This is typically done in conjunction with a recapitalization.

In our investments, we look for a meaningful ownership stake and always look for a role for Serent to work actively with management in building the business.