Rafael Alvarez-Novoa, The Riverside Company

Relationship

“Our relationship with Clearwater is very good and we have enjoyed working together for many years. We find Clearwater partners very diligent, hard-working, pragmatic, dynamic and creative professionals. We also understand each other very well, and Clearwater knows what we are looking for and what types of deals we can or cannot do. It means the conversation with Clearwater is always very focused.”

Skills

“We find Clearwater partners have a great combination of technical skills and commercial capabilities. This is very important when it comes to initially approaching entrepreneurs and business owners as establishing a relationship and then maturing the idea to undertake a transaction is a delicate matter. This philosophy means that Clearwater is able to successfully approach a lot of companies and, in turn, introduce us to those companies. Although we have our own deal origination team, we are still happy to work with Clearwater on deal origination too. As two firms we are effectively coming at origination from both sides and that really works.”

Sector knowledge

“One of the things I really like about Clearwater, and something which is a real differentiator in my view, is that Clearwater has strong sector experts alongside this M&A capability. This is a very powerful combination and particularly valuable when you are looking at investing in a niche sector as we usually do. It also ensures we focus on the right targets.

“For instance a deal we worked on was when Clearwater advised the nutrition and plant health products Grupo Probelte on the sale of its biotech portfolio to us. Clearwater approached us because they had the sector knowledge to know that we and our portfolio company Euromed would be good buyers for the company.”

Global reach

“Clearwater has good reach internationally and I can definitely see Riverside using this global network more in the future. We have a pan-European approach and, like Clearwater, focus on the mid-market so we should do more work together globally.”

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