When your MD refuses to believe that a private company financials are not publicly available, what has been your go-to move?
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In descending order for me:
Tried all of these plus a few other tools, MM and BB. No dice with other firms
If you have any friends with questionable morals that are in LP / allocator roles and the company in question is PE-sponsored, worth asking them.
Outside of asking the business owner, you are working with imperfect information.
A couple resources are D&B or Pitchbook, but even they struggle to get accurate results.
Sometimes you can find a periodical where the company talks about revenue (i.e. - Some business journals highlight "20xx Growth Reports").
Maybe the company received an award which has revenue buckets (i.e. - Best Places to Work in XXXX).
If the company has contracts with the federal government you may be able to find revenue size.
An alternative is that you could gauge size of the company based on how many employees they have on LinkedIN. Again, not perfect but will provide insight on directional size.
And after all the above has been done - if the FS are not available, tell the MD to calm the fuck down and stop hyperventilating
Check and see if they have any registered debt. Or if they have 144A debt you may be able to pull some financials from a Bloomberg.
Might be able to find some historical filings if the company was taken private. Sounds like you tried every reasonable option though.
Would be careful on the employee size comparison depending on the industry.
Are you pitching to the company or just including them as a potential target or something?
If its just some small company and your bank does not have a relationship figure out how to set up yourself as the relationship manager, call the company (its so easy to find small private company management contact info online) and introduce yourself. Tell the company you work with X bank and that you are interested in learning more about the company and their story. Ask some basic financial questions...there are many ways to gauge company size based on how they answer. This is what VP level guys start to do...why not start as an analyst?
Just make absolutely sure somebody at the firm does not already have that as a relationship already (also check contacts as sometimes people have prior relationships with execs that jump companies). This will get you major brownie points with your MD if it leads to a new relationship for him.
I know this is a super late bump, but I'm in a similar scenario and I'm going to have to reach out to management of a handful of private companies to get some financials. How do you approach this without sounding like a vulture, especially if you are particularly interested to see if it is a distressed company?
You can ask about number of employees, rounds of funding, a good benchmark for smaller companies is around $5-10mm EBITDA (just throw a number out there and ask over under), recurring revenue, ask what their typical sales cycle is like, types of customers/concentration. CEOs love to talk about their company, its not that hard to get them going.
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I'd throw in Crunchbase, Owler, and PrivCo (especially PrivCo if you have a membership to it) as a list of resources to look at.
Ah, banking. Where 80/20 is thrown out the window, and you get reamed for having one digit off on a 100-page pitchbook. Do not miss those days.
the ol 'wine n dine the fat ops chick' works well for me. Act fast before the winter coat takes hold.
Public debt is your only real accurate source.
Careful with CIQ. I remember seeing that they booked Koch industries revenue at 20M or something crazy. Otherwise it's a high level call with management and extrapolation thereafter
A lot of resources available are not very accurate. The best available option is usually what some of the others pointed out...Googling and finding articles on the co that mention revenue/growth.
(double posted)
"N/A"
"N/A" and tell the MD to eat a bag of dicks for a stupid ask
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