Quarterly Feature September 2014
Growing Promise to
Global Champion
Nurturing Great SMEs for Global Growth
Dr Indranil Ghosh
www.tigerhillcapital.com
2 | Tiger Hill Capital | www.tigerhillcapital.com
Foreword
Tiger Hill Capital (THC) is an investment
management and advisory company
that commits its capabilities, network
and capital to businesses with the
potential to deliver transformative
solutions for global economic and
social challenges.
Our core capabilities of dual-bottomline investing; business-building; and
global access to capital, knowledge and
talent are attractive to both our investor
and enterprise clients.
Tiger Hill Capital attracts accomplished
investment and business-building
professionals with a passion for
developing innovative businesses and
projects.
In our quarterly feature series, THC’s
partners present perspectives from
their areas of expertise and insights
from their recent projects. We typically
focus on topics of broad relevance
to our clients in which THC is driving
innovation.
In this issue, Dr Indranil Ghosh reflects
on Tiger Hill’s experience in partnering
with rapidly growing SMEs to capture
their full global potential. What are
the characteristic of these future
global champions? What challenges
must they overcome as they evolve
from serving their first customers to
operating across several large markets?
How can they continue to focus on
innovation and growth while they adopt
the required structures, systems, and
processes? Dr Ghosh begins to explore
these key questions in the first of a
series of articles dedicated to this
topic.
3 | Quarterly Feature September 2014 | [email protected]
Growing Promise to
Global Champion
Nurturing Great SMEs for Global Growth
From the tea gardens of Darjeeling in NorthEastern India arises the magnificent 3000M
peak of Tiger Hill, a jewel in the foothills of the
Himalayas. Those who climb the mountain
are invariably mesmerized by its beauty and
tranquility, but the true reward lies at the summit
where they can behold the indescribable majesty
of Mount Everest. In its mighty shadow, most
experience a mixture of awe and silent humility.
However, Tiger Hill Capital is dedicated to those
rare individuals who reach the summit of Tiger
Hill only to develop and unquenchable thirst to
conquer Everest! These are the entrepreneurs
who aspire to grow their businesses into global
champions and transform their industries in the
process.
Small-Medium Enterprises are the growth
engine of every successful economy. It is a
well-documented fact that the SME sector is
critical to widespread economic prosperity in a
nation. SMEs create employment, bring regional
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prosperity, and add a critical layer of suppliers
and service providers to industry clusters.
SMEs also serve as a medium to unleash
entrepreneurial energy and bring innovation to
the market. They are a crucible of new products
and business models that increase productivity
as entrepreneurs channel their creativity to
deliver valuable services with limited resources.
Not surprisingly, progressive national and
regional governments strive to nurture SMEs by
providing regulatory, fiscal, and infrastructural
incentives. However, there are relatively few
commercial advisory firms that focus on
partnering with SMEs and empowering them to
achieve their full potential on a global scale. This
is the gap that Tiger Hill Capital aims to fill with
its unique model of bringing a global network
of talent, customer, and capital relationships to
bear for high-potential growth companies.
From our experience of working with highgrowth businesses, we have developed a good
nose for identifying the winners. The recipe for
success seems to consist of two key ingredients:
exquisite market timing and positioning and
extraordinary leadership.
Explosive growth is possible when a variety of
market factors converge to create vast demand
for a new solution (often to an old problem) and
when the means to deliver that solution (e.g.,
technological, regulatory) are newly available.
This is the first ingredient of the recipe. A good
example is the digitization of the healthcare
industry. The drive for universal healthcare
access in a time of aging and ailing populations
is leading to spiraling healthcare costs. New
paradigms of healthcare provision are required.
An initial wave of business models attacked
productivity challenges in the healthcare
provision (e.g., Electronic medical records).
A modern wave of solutions tries to improve
health outcomes before the patient reaches a
traditional healthcare provider (e.g., telemedicine,
psychographic health coaching, personal vitals
monitoring). Tiger Hill Capital’s Healthcare team
is working with several companies that engage
with doctors, patients, and drug manufacturers to
find integrated solutions to healthcare provision.
When we find companies that have discovered
the first ingredient, ultimate success rests on
the second: the entrepreneur or the core team.
Growth companies destined for global stature
are led by extraordinary individuals. First and
foremost, these individuals are driven by a higher
purpose. They are driven to make a difference
that will never be captured by business metrics
alone. They draw intense passion and energy
from their purpose and are able to transmit it to
their customers, employees, and shareholders.
Second, these individuals have an uncanny
ability to focus their energy in areas that deliver
rapid progress. As a result, they are able to work
with limited resources to build strong momentum
and gain support. Finally, these individuals tend
to be comfortable surrounding themselves with
top talent. Rather than being intimidated by
people who are smarter, more experienced or
have different personalities, successful growth
leaders attract world-class talent and bring the
best out of them. They steer a rousing debate
among their top team in a way that leads to better
solutions rather than confusion and discord.
Future champions possessing these two key
ingredients are to be found around the globe.
Regardless of their origins, we have found that
these companies share challenges in the areas
of ‘corporate development’ and global growth.
Given limited resources but a seemingly vast set
of opportunities, high-growth companies must be
able to enhance their management capabilities
through rapid corporate development in the
areas of Strategy and Portfolio Management,
Organization and Governance, Talent, Processes
and Systems.
The first challenge is often to replace
opportunistic growth with a strategically-planned
approach. Growth companies have to develop a
solid mid-term strategy and a rigorous system to
prioritize among numerous investment options.
With growth, comes new products, new customer
groups, new geographies and even new business
models – all sitting under one crowded roof. A
coherent organizational structure with clear
roles and responsibilities is no longer a nice-tohave but critical to survival. Placing strong talent,
committed for the long-term, and well-qualified
for key positions must also be approached like a
science – not a game of luck. Financial systems,
standard operating procedures, career pathways
etc. must be implemented to increase the
company’s scalability. And all this must be done
without suffocating the entrepreneurial vitality
that created the growth dynamo in the first place.
The transition from the invigorating, ‘all-handson-deck’, collegial ethos of a young company
to one that operates with greater structure and
5 | Quarterly Feature September 2014 | [email protected]
discipline can involve a difficult – even painful
– change in mindset. In the case of a successful
family-owned, regional businesses, there is
often the additional challenge of introducing
professional managers with functional skills
and regional expertise who will challenge the
status quo of the family governance structure
and local business practices. Tiger Hill Capital
is very skilled in managing these tough change
programs. Individual and team coaching is
as central to our model as implementing our
strategy, organization, governance and talent
processes.
While many of the corporate development
challenges are the same, the geographic origin
of a company can profoundly affect how it
approaches global growth. A rapid, sustained
growth phase requires that a company build
a strong foundation in a large market(s) and
establish a cost and capability advantage that
will protect it against emerging competitors.
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A future champion must learn to configure
its assets around the globe to source talent
and raw materials cheaply and reliably while
projecting a strong local sales and marketing
presence in its biggest markets. For example,
one of our technology companies maintains its
development hub in its California Headquarters,
uses its own sales team to manage its earlyadopting US customers, and leverages Tiger
Hill’s regional hubs in Europe and the Middle East
as conduits for sales and new product ideas.
In contrast, with two family-owned industrial
businesses in Italy and the Middle East, Tiger
Hill’s initial focus was to professionalize the local
operations and create a governance structure
that empowered and incentivized partners in
the US and Europe to perform to a higher level.
Whatever the winning configuration of skills and
assets, Tiger Hill’s global network of experts is
well-placed to advise and implement the required
model.
Tiger Hill’s capabilities have been applied
with equal success to early-stage technology
companies with $5-10M in revenues to mid-size
regional business conglomerated with $1-2B in
turnover. Our approach to corporate development
and global growth acceleration is flexible enough
to be applied to a broad range of businesses of
varying size and scope. In upcoming articles,
our team will explore elements of our model in
greater detail. We hope these publications will
articulate how a proven set of techniques can
be applied to your business to accelerate the
journey from Tiger Hill to Everest.
Dr Indranil Ghosh
CEO - Tiger Hill Capital
Dr. Ghosh is the CEO and Founder of Tiger
Hill Capital. He is based in London and leads
the firm’s research and investment activities
as well as spearheading the Healthcare
platform. Dr. Ghosh is a well-known figure in
the investment community and manages Tiger
Hill’s relationships with sovereign investors
and large private business groups.
Prior to Tiger Hill Capital, Dr. Ghosh was the
Head of Strategy and Macroeconomics at
Mubadala, a $60Bn direct investment company
of the Abu Dhabi government. He was
responsible for portfolio strategy, incubation of
new investment areas, and corporate business
development. Earlier in his investment career,
Dr. Ghosh was a Senior Investment Advisor
at Bridgewater Associates (Westport, US),
the largest Global Macro hedge fund in
the world with over $100Bn assets under
management. Dr. Ghosh began his career
at McKinsey and Company where he was
an Associate Partner in the New York Office
and advised numerous healthcare, financial
services and private equity clients.
Dr. Ghosh holds a PhD and MSCEP
in Chemical Engineering from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
a M.Eng. and MA in Natural Sciences from
Trinity College, Cambridge University.
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©Tiger Hill Capital, Ltd. 2014