For investors
Portfolio companies do not always need another consultant. Sometimes they need someone to build the thing.
Bayman deploys Operating Partners into portfolio companies when management needs additional operating infrastructure and the business is not ready to carry permanent executive headcount.
The gap
The company has a plan. What it does not have is anyone with the time or the skill to build what the plan assumes.
The pattern repeats at the smaller end of most portfolios. Diligence identified the operational gaps. The hundred day plan named them. The management team agreed with all of it. Then the quarter started, and the people who were going to build the reporting infrastructure went back to running the company, because that is their actual job.
The usual responses are a consulting firm, which produces a diagnosis the company already had, or a senior hire, which adds permanent cost to a P&L that is not ready to carry it and takes six months to know whether it worked.
An Operating Partner is the third option: someone who goes in, builds what was agreed, teaches the team to run it, and leaves the capability behind.
Applications
Where this is usually deployed.
Scoped to a named outcome, in a defined window, against a specific gap rather than a general improvement mandate.
Post-acquisition integration
Two stacks, two chart of accounts, two versions of every process. Joining them without stopping either business.
CRM and revenue infrastructure
Pipeline that can be inspected, stages that mean something, and a forecast the board can plan against.
Reporting systems
The monthly pack, produced the same way every month, reconciled to the accounting file rather than assembled by hand.
Operating cadence
Weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythms with owners and thresholds, so performance is managed between board meetings.
Data cleanup
The unglamorous work underneath every other initiative. Deduplicated records, defined fields, and one authoritative source per number.
Technology architecture
What the company runs, what it costs, what overlaps, what should be turned off, and what has to be connected.
Value creation initiatives
The operational items on the plan that need someone to actually build them rather than track them.
Pre-exit infrastructure
Diligence will find whatever is not documented. Building it beforehand is cheaper than explaining its absence during a process.
Operational stabilisation
A migration that stalled, an integration nobody owns, a process that broke when volume doubled. Short, specific, finished.
How it works with a sponsor
The Operating Partner works for the company.
You can engage us, and you should get the reporting you need. But the person on the ground has to be useful to management, or nothing gets built.
Into the company
The Operating Partner reports into the management team day to day. A build only works if the people who will own it treat the builder as help rather than as supervision.
Into you
You get the scope, the sequence, progress against it, and a straight answer about what is working. We are not going to tell you a build is on track when it is not.
A handover, not a renewal
Documentation, training, and a named owner inside the company. We would rather come back for the next build than quietly become permanent overhead on a portfolio company.
We are not a monitoring function and we will not be your eyes inside a management team. If the real problem is that you do not trust the operator, this is the wrong instrument for it.
The alternatives
Why not just do one of the usual three.
Each of these is right in some situation. Here is where each one struggles at the smaller end of a portfolio.
Strong analysis, a clear recommendation, and a document. At a twenty million dollar portfolio company, the diagnosis was usually already known and the constraint was never analysis.
The build is still ahead of you
The right answer when the role is permanent. For a finite infrastructure build it adds fixed cost, a recruiting cycle, and six months before you know whether the person can do it.
Permanent cost for a finite problem
Excellent, and usually oversubscribed. Most operating groups are staffed for the platform assets, and the smaller companies wait their turn.
Capacity, not capability
Someone goes in, builds the infrastructure, teaches the team to run it, and leaves. Defined scope, defined period, fixed fee, no permanent headcount added to the company.
We do not just tell you what should exist. We build it.
Straight answers
Three things worth knowing before a first call.
We are two people. That is the reason we can look carefully at a company most firms cannot afford to look at, and it is also a real constraint on how many deployments run at once. We would rather say we are full than staff a build with someone you have not met.
We are not going to sit on your board, replace a management team, or run a company. If the operator is the problem, that is a decision for you and it is not one an Operating Partner should be used to make.
We publish what we have not done yet. Bayman is a young firm and the honest version of that is on the about page rather than buried. A firm without a long record should be judged on how it thinks and on what it will tell you when the answer is unhelpful.
Next
Have a company that needs something built?
Tell us which one, what the plan assumes, and what has not happened yet. We will tell you on the first call whether a deployment is the right instrument.