Intensive resourcing
We pack our companies with the strategic and financial resources they need to achieve rapid growth.
That’s why we refuse to hold too many investments at once. It is a gold standard at Duke Street that we never have more companies in our portfolio than we have investment professionals.
Our goal is to create maximum value at the point of exit – not through financial engineering or selling at higher multiples, but through investing the time and resource to create companies with real long-term value.
At Duke Street we often talk about over-resourcing our portfolio companies. By that we mean going further than any of our competitors to give our companies the financial and strategic backing they need.
Our Operating Partners are a crucial part of the resources we bring. They sit alongside our own investment professionals and the CEO to bring real operational substance to our work. Often the companies we invest need to overcome operational rather than financial problems and this makes the work of our Operating Partners absolutely critical.
But CEOs also have constant access, whenever they need it, to our investment professionals too, right up to and including our Managing Partners. This is both through formal events like strategic reviews but will, typically, also be more informal.
We encourage our management teams to think long-term even if that means enduring some pain in the medium-term. We also encourage our CEOs to over-resource their own management teams – so that they have the right support around them to succeed.
You can read more about how this approach works in the detailed case studies of our current and previous investments.