Welcome to The Decatur Group

Home

Investment Criteria

The Decatur Group seeks to invest along general lines as follows:

Company and Transactions

- Revenues of $10 - $250 million

- EBITDA greater than $2 million

- Equity contributions of upwards of $50 million

- We have invested in a wide range of industries over the years and will continue to consider investments in different markets with exceptions of oil and gas, biotechnology and other industries where extreme specialization is required.

- Family owned businesses, corporate divestitures, recapitalizations, buyouts

- We will invest in non-control transactions where negative control from a governance standpoint is possible. We are not investors for traditional non-control growth capital rounds or financings.

Focus on The Opportunity

We gravitate towards businesses with the ability to grow organically versus relying on M&A as the primary driver of value creation. Our primary underwriting criteria for an investment is to assess the opportunity for operating cash flow growth in relation to our perception of execution risk, and weighted by the capital required. The relationship between these three factors drives our underwriting process.

Companies in our target range tend to operate in smaller, more fragmented market sectors. This provides an opportunity to improve financial results from an intense focus on operations, process improvement and measured strategic initiatives when executed by proven operators.

Our team is comprised of management executives with substantial operating backgrounds, which provides the firm with the expertise to focus on operations as the primary means of value creation. We respect the division of responsibility between sponsors and operating management in order to ensure the overall success of a transaction.

For Management Teams

We believe our background as operators gives us unique perspective on leadership of small to mid-sized companies. In addition to help building a $2 billion operating business, we continue to serve as lead operators of a business today. We believe this makes us a better partner to management teams and the companies in which we invest. Additionally, we believe our equity structures and incentive structures speak to our ethos of partnership.

For Intermediaries

We believe we can be a great candidate in the right situations. Our experience is that we are most competitive in situations where selling principals value a partner, whether resulting from industry experience, our operating backgrounds or other criteria of fit. We are not a great candidate for businesses that every buyer would naturally value. We are willing to consider situations that are imperfect where a reasonable operating plan and capital can result in a business that would be valued by customers. We will consider transaction types and company backgrounds across a wide range of situations.