Industry
Telecommunications
Location
HQ in Atlanta, GA
Employees
20,000
Athena helped Cox Communications identify areas of innovation, driving disruptive growth in new markets and industries.
Cox Communications provides digital cable television, telecommunications, and home automation services. It is the third-largest cable television provider in the United States, serving approximately 6.5 million customers, including 2.9 million digital cable subscribers, 3.5 million Internet subscribers, and almost 3.2 million digital telephone subscribers, making it the seventh-largest telephone carrier in the country.
HOW WE ENGAGED WITH COX COMMUNICATIONS
The Strategic Business Development group is responsible for activating strategic partnerships, investments, and acquisitions at Cox Communications.
The group pursues thematic areas including IOT, Edge, Healthcare, Digital Marketing, and more. “We love to identify what’s next for our organization as well as collaborate with startups, VCs, and enterprises to bring innovation to life.”
ROLE OF THE STRATEGIC BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT GROUP AT COX
Sri Malladi came to support my team in 2021 during a critical period in our team’s development. Our team was just beginning to get ramped up inside a broader organization and had a tremendous amount of activity to manage and a robust amount of market activity/deals to keep up with.
HOW WE ACCELERATED GROWTH FOR COX COMMUNICATIONS THROUGH M&A
Sri’s skillsets working in this model were invaluable. His functional Corporate Development background and willingness to dive into any task – no matter how large or small over a wide variety of functional areas, including market landscaping, detailed deal analysis, and deal strategy development – enabled us to run at a pace that it would not have been possible to do without him.
Furthermore, Sri has been able to plug into our team seamlessly, which has been a treat throughout a period of transition. His working style is adaptive and extremely pleasant. He is constantly thinking about how the market can be applied to our thematic pursuits.
Sri’s flexibility, adaptability, and effectiveness has been truly invaluable to our team at Cox Communications.
“Most notably, Sri’s work helped Cox create a thesis, landscape a market and make a sizable investment in highly strategically company. This investment and the body of work to support it took nearly six months of weekly sessions with key leaders; Sri’s analyses were key to our ability to support the thesis and helped elevate our team’s thinking.”
Christine Primmer
Lead, Strategic Business Development, Cox Communications
Industry
Manufacturing and Services
Location
HQ in Cork, Ireland
Employees
97,000
Johnson Controls (JCI) engineers, manufactures and services building products and systems. JCI has annual revenues of ~$24 billion and serves customers in more than 150 countries.
Wilkie Catron, Vice President & Head of Corporate Development, oversees a sizeable deal pipeline and a strong internal corp dev team. He engaged us with the following objectives:
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“I was looking for a strong interim senior M&A resource who could bring thought leadership, knew how to drive a transaction and could work well with internal stakeholders and external parties.”
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“In my world, it’s very important to be able to combine the finance knowledge with how to drive a deal to close and to work with different sellers of varying expertise levels.”
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“At JCI, we work in a collaborative and fast-paced environment. I believe that it’s critical to fully engage the business in the decision making, partner with them along the full deal journey and to keep the process going smoothly while paying attention to the details.”
HOW WE HELPED JOHNSON CONTROLS ACCELERATE GROWTH WITH M&A
Athena helped JCI to drive to successful decisions on three transactions of meaningful size and significance, across three different businesses, by forcing clarity on valuation while engaging the business in the decision making.
Typically, an individual who joins the team has a learning curve of 4-6 months, which is normal. You were able to ramp up quickly in a matter of weeks, and provide first-class service with a very short learning curve.
During this time, you also helped us to develop a comprehensive easy-to-use financial model that incorporates the different scenarios that we like to see.
“In a matter of 5-6 weeks, Athena helped us to bring one deal past LOI and to drive two other substantial deals to a successful resolution.”
Wilkie Catron
Vice President & Head of Corporate Development, Johnson Controls
Industry
Real estate, equipment rental and services
Location
Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, with 11 studios across the United States
Athena helped Cinelease evaluate new growth opportunities, closing their first deal within just six weeks of our partnership.
Since 1977, Cinelease Studios (a division of public company HercRentals) has been procuring and equipping locations with lighting and equipment to provide high-quality services to the film and television industry.
OUR JOURNEY WITH CINELEASE
Gannon posed this challenge to Athena:
Specifically, here’s what I want:
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Help me to convey my vision for the business so that I can drive strategic growth for Cinelease and get internal buy-in for the right investments
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Explain the economics of the business so that the real estate expense is not merely viewed as a cost line item but one that drives real economic value for the business.
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Use the rich data set and market knowledge that we have already acquired to quickly evaluate new opportunities.
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Build consensus within Cinelease and obtain funding so that my team and I can drive rapid and profitable growth for the business.
OUR PROCESS
Over a period of ~6 weeks, we iterated through different ways to represent the economics of the business. We collaborated with Gannon and his team to really understand their vision for where they wanted to take the business and reflected that vision into an economic model.
HOW WE HELPED CINELEASE ACCELERATE GROWTH THROUGH M&A
Cinelease can now:
Make rapid decisions on new investments by tweaking a few inputs and getting a directionally accurate idea of whether the deal works.
Evaluate a deal in different geographies throughout the U.S. with just a few clicks.
Analyze how shifts in the macro-environment, the upfront investment into the location, the utilization of facilities, and other business levers impact the P&L and business KPIs.
Closed the first deal in ~six weeks of working together and are on their way to doing more using the asset we built together.
We closed one deal in six weeks, and obtained the internal funding to do so… We now have a highly scalable and robust model that can be easily applied to other markets and new opportunities.”
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Gannon Murphy
General Manager, Cinelease Studios
Industry
Media
Location
Santa Ana, California
Employees
1,000
Anuvu provides connectivity and content to aircrafts and cruise-ships. Anuvu has ~1,000 employees globally and has offices on six continents
Lori and her team explained to Athena their challenges and their vision for the ideal deliverables:
Our financial model has been modified at different points in time by various external advisors and by our internal teams. It does the job; but it’s unnecessarily complex. We now have over 50 tabs, many of which we don’t use.
In addition, our business segments provide granular data inputs, that all need to be rolled into the consolidated model – without making it bulky and difficult to use.
So.. the objective is to rebuild our model so that it’s very easy to understand and identifies our business drivers and KPIs clearly. We want to be able to update it easily and quickly.
And yes, we want to be able to trust every number and confidently use it to make strategic decisions.
HOW DID ATHENA PARTNER WITH ANUVU?
With the support of Lori’s team, we understood the business drivers in depth. We audited the entire model to identify the data that was relevant. We studied the analysis and the Board and management reporting. We parsed through the 3-statements and made sure the economics of the business were correctly represented in the model. We iterated through the deliverable until we were 100% sure it met all their needs.
HOW DID WE HELP ANUVU?
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In just three weeks, the Anuvu Finance team received a financial model that did everything they wanted and is easy to understand, update and use….and about 75% smaller than the model with which we started.
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Achieved the right balance that allows the segment teams to generate sophisticated input drivers, while keeping the consolidated model lightweight and flexible.
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Team feels confident about using it for go-forward strategic decision making and about sharing it with investors, management and the Board.
“Rebuilt and simplified our financial forecasting model in under three weeks. We’re excited to use this upgraded tool for our management and Board reporting.”
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Lori Colleran
VP, Financial Planning & Analysis and Business Finance, Anuvu
Industry
Staffing and Consulting
Location
Irvine, California
Employees
~3,800 (including ~2,800 professional consultants on assignment)
SITUATION
The RGP leadership team has a thoughtful M&A strategy and is committed to an ambitious growth plan (through both M&A and organic initiatives). The team also cultivated a pipeline of deals.
But they did not have the right bench strength in-house available to build the financial business case and value the targets.
WHAT RGP WAS LOOKING FOR
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“We needed the right skill-set who knew not only what questions to ask to value the business
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… but could also build a work product that helped our senior team to make decisions
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… and provide us insights to help us negotiate with targets.”
HOW DID ATHENA HELP RGP WITH THEIR M&A JOURNEY?
Athena helped RGP to thoughtfully evaluate five acquisitions, collaborating closely with the business sponsor and our leadership team to ask the right questions.
FEEDBACK FROM RGP
“You knew how to get at the right information, and how to obtain the right assumptions that are necessary to evaluate the acquisition.”
“Athena helped us to evaluate five acquisitions, collaborating closely with the business sponsor and our leadership team to ask the right questions. You knew how to get at the right information, and how to obtain the right assumptions that are necessary to evaluate the acquisition.”
“You’ve seen a lot, across different industries and scenarios. You’re not just a consultant but also a coach and a teacher and we’ve learned a lot by working with you -and you make us better as a team over time”
“You’ve pushed us to ask ourselves the hard questions earlier on in the process, including the synergies possible, how we will integrate the target (or not), and what the business needs to be able to achieve to justify the valuation.”
Julie Shaver
Corporate Development & Strategy, RGP, SVP
Industry
Staffing and Consulting
Location
Utah, United States
SITUATION:
Bruce and his team were evaluating a potential acquisition to bolster their offerings to clients. Bruce asked Athena to help evaluate the opportunity before investing time into doing more advanced due diligence.
HOW DID ATHENA HELP?
We first understood exactly how Crescentia was planning to leverage the new product to help their clients. Before doing a diligence deep dive, we asked a few questions that would help Bruce and team to discover if the acquisition was worth pursuing in its current form.
OUTCOME:
As a result of our analysis, Crescentia decided that the acquisition target was not ready to be acquired, and that the target would need to do much more additional work. Crescentia backed off from the deal, but is continuing to work with the acquisition target as a partner, to improve their product.
“You helped us see things several steps ahead - and saved us so much money and headache and resources. You helped us see all these different moving parts, the strategic side of things that we hadn’t considered.”
Bruce Decaster
CEO, Crescentia
Industry
Design and graphics services
Location
Connecticut, United States
SITUATION
Randy was considering strategic options for the business, including a sale, and wanted help with getting The Visual Brand (TVB) ready.
HOW DID ATHENA HELP?
We helped value TVB’s business and get the business ready to engage with potential buyers.
“We are in control of the process now - instead of being a price-taker, we know what we’re worth and we can defend this to buyers. Working with Athena was collaborative and you took the time to understand our business.”
Randy Herbertson
CEO, The Visual Brand
Reach out to learn more about the many other companies we've helped.
HOW CAN WE HELP YOU WITH M&A?
BOOK A CALL
We’ll discuss your vision and how our team can help you surpass your revenue goals. Over 1-2 calls, we will uncover your current roadblocks and explain what you need to move forward.
BUILD YOUR ROADMAP
We present a proposal and plan of action to help your company get from where it is today to where you want it to be.
IMPLEMENT YOUR SOLUTIONS
At Athena, you won’t just get a plan telling you what to do, you’ll have an expert team implementing the plan for you so you can reach your business goals faster.