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George Buchanan
George leads on all our marketing and communication activities. He joined GCP in 2021 and has over seven years’ marketing experience.
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GCP Review of 2022
As we return from the festive break, we reflect on 2022 and are delighted to say that it was a very successful year for GCP, including a successful fund close, new investments, team expansion & promotions, and the launch of our new website & branding.
Fund V close and launch of a new website
We marked the beginning of 2022 achieving a significant milestone. With the announcement of the final close of our most recent fund, Fund V. The fund closed at £260m beating our target and we were pleased to welcome back many of our highly supportive existing investors, as well as beginning new relationships with an expanded group of distinguished international institutions.
Alongside this announcement we also launched our new website and branding, highlighting our core values, Technology and Services sector expertise and genuine partnership approach.
Further investments from Fund V
Our successful year of new investments in 2021 continued into 2022. In May we announced our fourth investment from Fund V, a minority investment in specialist cloud services provider, Container Solutions. Container Solutions deliver large scale digital transformations for enterprise clients, enabling organisations to realise all the benefits that operating in the Cloud provides, including flexible deployment of services, resilience of infrastructure, speed to market and automation.
Continuing to build on our extensive technology sector track record, we had a busy summer of activity where in July, we announced two investments in one week. First we announced our investment in Robiquity Group . Robiquity is a specialist Intelligent Automation services provider with a heritage in implementing robotic process automation applications and enabling businesses to automate and scale manual processes using technology.
Following this, we announced our investment in Plenitude Consulting. Plenitude is a specialist GRC business that provides expert Financial Crime Compliance consulting and a suite of RegTech solutions, to a broad range of major international financial institutions, in banking, insurance and asset management and digital assets.
All three of these new investment partnerships have grown from strength to strength and you can read more about the growth initiatives and developments from 2022 across our portfolio here.
Promotions and team expansion
In April we announced three promotions, with John Marsh being promoted to Finance Partner and Heidi Farley and Liam Bennett promoted to Investment Manager, continuing our long track record of investment in people and team career development.
In the summer we welcomed new faces into our investment team, with two new Investment Managers, Dan Lee and Joe Kennedy and Dominic Judd joining us as an Investment Executive.
We also made significant developments in expanding our operational and strategic capabilities by welcoming Portfolio Director, Sam Ellis and Operational Partner, Paul Driver. Sam and Paul will play key roles in supporting the fantastic entrepreneurs we work with, leveraging our ‘Growth Toolkit’ methodology to facilitate accelerated growth, international expansion and shareholder value creation.
Industry Insights
Throughout the year, members from the team have been involved in a range of events and developments across the PE industry and highlights of their insights are provided below:
- What digital transformation means for SMEs
- The importance of ESG – creating value by doing the right thing
- Discussing Diversity in Private Equity – in conversation with Emily Henderson and Heidi Farley
- The benefits of minority partnerships and the opportunities they bring to developing organic growth – In partnership with Real Deals magazine.
- Supporting strategic growth initiatives with our Growth Toolkit – In partnership with Actum Group.
- Understanding a PE partnership and what to look for
- How can you maximise your consultancy’s exit value and prospects?
- International growth opportunities and how partnering with PE can support businesses to navigate the challenges and create significant scale and value
We now enter the New Year, excited to continue supporting the outstanding growth companies we have partnered with in their successful international growth plans and focused on investing GCP Fund V in new genuine partnership investments across the Technology and Services sectors. We wish all our portfolio businesses, investors, trusted advisors, and friends a successful and prosperous 2023.