That doesn’t mean we pretend to know more than you about running your business. We help where we believe we can add value, and work in absolute alignment with management teams.
Our business is so much better. The partnership has made our business more scalable and stable, and we’re just a better business on all levels.
We’re motivated by the exceptional people we work with and how we can deliver success for them. Our experience gives us the confidence to be calm, and we approach every challenge and opportunity together as a team.
There is three things that we look for in the businesses that we work with are growth, brilliant management teams, and a desire to work with us. Growth is the number one thing – that’s what we’re backing businesses to do. That’s what excites us. That’s why we turn up for work in the morning.
At ECI we’ve got three teams – the investment team, the commercial team, and the origination team – and when you bring those three together, I think it’s really easy to get excited about what ECI can bring to the table. We’ve got our office in New York, so if you as a manager want to enter the US, I can point you to five to ten different CEOs who’ve done exactly the same thing in the last five years and can give you that wealth of information that might otherwise take you ten years to accumulate.
ECI is a very low ego organisation. It is a humble and friendly culture – we all get along really well. I’ve worked with a business that talks about a Sydney flight test and if I look across my colleagues, I’d be comfortable flying to Sydney with all of them. One of the great things we can bring to bear when we back a growth company is the fact we’ve got over 45 years of experience and 250 companies we’ve invested in. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, we are very open about that, and some of the teams we’ve backed have made mistakes too, but we can help our companies not make those same mistakes again. We’ve seen the film, we know what the ending is.
We don’t overreact. I think one of the things we’re good at is being measured in our response and thoughtful about what we do next. We place such an emphasis on being naturally collaborative, recognising the value of teams, and having a flat structure so that we can collaborate really effectively and that’s both internally and with the teams we work with.
Ultimately, for the management team, we want to be their biggest fan. We want them to be the hero. We want them to be successful not only over our investment period but several investment periods beyond that, and that becomes a success for us. That’s the definition of our oak tree.
For us good ESG practice is just good business practice, so we have invested to make sure we can support management teams with their ESG needs. We are committed to balancing the needs of various stakeholders, taking into account profit, people and planet. It is why we are B Corp certified.
In ‘Building successful businesses’ we speak to CEOs about the building blocks of success and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
We’ve learned how to help businesses overcome the challenges of an ever-changing world. We’ve built a network that unlocks opportunity all over the world. And we’ve harnessed deep pools of expertise able to support your ambitions.
