Tristone Capital: Investing for purpose and profit

Challenge

Tristone Capital is a specialist investor that acquires and scales social care businesses. The business is passionate in the belief that positive commercial returns can, and should, go hand in hand with positive social impact, and looks to partner closely with management teams to deliver future growth. Tristone has a very specific target audience of profitable care companies with enterprise values of up to £20 million, with good market share and prospects for growth, led by managers with strong commercial and operational judgement. Our brief was to support the growth of the investor to underpin successful fundraising and attracting new acquisitions that met these criteria.

Succession The Age-Old Question

Idea

We had to define and deeply understand our target audience and their drivers. Our instinct was that there was an aging generation of business owners in the care sector with no clear succession planning in place, but the data wasn’t available to back this up. As such, we conducted our own research of Companies House to ascertain the average age of a person with significant control (director) at a care business and truly understand current ownership structures and the make-up of the boards of businesses Tristone was targeting.

Implementation

Petal & Co’s strategy was to use this research to create a unique campaign around “Succession Planning – the age-old question.”

We knew that by being the ones to highlight this sector wide issue, we could quickly educate the market – and individual business owners – on how Tristone is able to acquire businesses and add value with operational sector expertise, in addition to providing capital. This would create a strong point of difference in the sector.

As well as providing us with the data we needed for a successful PR campaign, this innovative approach to research allowed us to simultaneously build a database of new contacts from the data available at Companies House.

This culminated in a report which created standout by:

  • Demonstrating deep sector expertise as market leader
  • Highlighting track record in the sector
  • Leveraging network and reach through contributions from thought leaders and advisers
  • Demonstrating a clear understanding of business owner mindset and encourage succession planning

The campaign was supported by tactics including:

  • A series of deal announcements to quickly build track record in front of audiences
  • Placing profiles of Tristone’s key people and facilitating interviews in top tier corporate finance and business media
  • Issues-led commentary and thought leadership in social care media
  • Timely input and responses to government and sector reviews and policy
  • Building a LinkedIn community and content hub for all of the above
  • An innovative report to support coverage, direct marketing, social and deal origination. We also partnered with adviser and thought leaders to expand report’s reach.

“The PR strategy devised and delivered by the team at Petal & Co. has worked far more effectively than we could have hoped for. We were optimistic it would raise our profile and position us in the market as an ethical and successful investor. However, it had exceeded these expectations and transformed the way we go to market by driving real growth with tangible creative and commercial results, as well as directly generating new deals for our business.”

Yannis Loucopoulos, CEO at Tristone Capital

Impact

PR results included 80+ articles in target media, but more crucially, the commercial impact was:

  • Increased deal origination with inbound enquiries as a direct result of PR coverage
  • Supported a successful fundraising round
  • At least one vendor directly approached Tristone on the back of PR of coverage, resulting in high quality deal for the investor

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