DEALMAKER OF THE YEAR
Sponsored by:
Winner: James Austin
Tony Hawks drew attention back to the Deals Awards presentations, and the individual title of ‘2015 Dealmaker of the Year’.
With the General Election imminent and this category involving personal voting Hawks reminded everyone that Deals Awards polling involved votes recorded by keypads rather than heavily marked crosses against nominee listings in their complimentary programmes.
So what constitutes a Dealmaker? The judges’ had clarified the category eligibility. Corporate finance advisers could plainly be nominated, but also the winner could be a lawyer, a banker or a private equity investor. The key factor in the judges’ determination was that a dealmaker had to either originate a deal or be a leader pushing a transaction through to completion.
Nominations for this prestigious award title were: James Austin of the Business Growth Fund; Simon Davies of Spectrum Corporate Finance; Duncan Lamb of Grant Thornton; last year’s winner Yann Souillard of LDC; and the newly crowned 2015 CorpFin Adviser of the Year, Andrew Thomson of HMT.
Investment director James Austin covers the Thames Valley for BGF. 2014 investments included Skyscape, the buy/build platform Intrapharm, and Canburg Group (Smallbone of Devizes and Mark Wilkinson luxury kitchens). He recently led BGF’s investment in Vysiion Group, the unification of three IT businesses across the south.
Simon Davies has had a hand in many of Spectrum’s deals in 2014 in either leading the deal team or broking the initial deal through his extensive contact base and deal experience. Reading-based Spectrum continued to thrive in the 2014 qualifying period with 16 deals at an aggregate value of £440 million.
Duncan Lamb leads the corporate team for Grant Thornton in the Thames Valley. GT’s team completed 23 deals in the year including
www.businessmag.co.uk
Business Growth Fund
the high-profile sales of Livingston and Rolling Luggage, and BGF’s investment in Skyscape.
The Reading office of LDC, led by Yann Souillard, has had another strong year, completing 15 transactions, including new investments in Equiom, Property Software Group, Connect and Clifford Thames.
Andrew Thomson is a founding partner of HMT which has had another strong year – 25 deals with total value of nearly £200m – including the Cooper Callas MBI, Maven’s investment in ISN, the MBO of EPI Group, and a £15m fundraise for Redeem. Thomson has led a significant number of HMT’s deals.
Suzanne Brooker, partner at the Thames Valley and Solent law firm Pitmans, stood ready to present the Dealmaker of the Year trophy.
Giant screens flashed up the overall voting result – the winning name of James Austin, who, resplendent in a Scottish kilt, received his award.
Launched in 2011, the BGF, backed by Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS, and Standard Chartered, has £2 billion of supportive funding to deploy to help Britain’s existing SMEs “take the next step up,” Austin explained.
The main BGF attractions are its long-term equity buyin and localised nature; its “more rounded approach” to building meaningful shared- goal business relationships, he added. “We are not venture capital. We look for good management team track records, proven business models and the desire to grow; businesses that are executing a plan, not proving a product or market.”
Why did he win? Having previously worked with RBS and LDC in Reading, Austin knows the Thames Valley deals community strengths well, and uses them to advantage. Extensive local professional advisory support enables efficient dealmaking, and the BGF was equally assured of “very high-quality regional advice”.
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – MAY 2015
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