Page 314 - James Caan - The Real Deal

Chapter 31

You Win Some, You

Lose Some (2005–2007)

‘ They say in business that your best loss is your first loss. ’

n the world of private equity Hamilton Bradshaw is a
I boutique. Typically, we invest less than £10 million in each deal
and we look to make two or three investments a year. We get
hundreds of approaches – since I’ve been on Dragons’ Den the
number has skyrocketed – and of those I reckon we take about
twenty seriously. Of the twenty, we reject half because the deal
doesn’t stack up, and the rest we spend a lot of time on.
I find that the £1 million to £10 million market is a very exciting
place for us to be because, in the past five years or so, private
equity has been about bigger and bigger deals. Firms were able to
raise money from institutional investors so easily that they had to
buy bigger and bigger companies to spend the money, hence the
EMI and Sainsbury’s takeovers. The bigger firms get consumed
with one big deal at a time, whereas we have several eggs in our
basket. I would say the average private equity firm has £250
million under management – maybe even closer to £500 million –
and when you’ve got that much money it’s not economically viable

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