“The Pudding definitely takes the time to understand the business first, which isn’t always the way. Getting underneath the skin of the business and understanding its drivers gives The Pudding a chance to really nail the brief, and that’s what they do.” A conversation with Mark Flood, Director, Renatus Capital Partners.
In this instalment of The Client Chronicles, we sit down with client and friend of The Pudding, Mark Flood, Director of Renatus Capital Partners. Over the past couple of years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with Renatus, as well as their client portfolio spanning Simtech Aviation and Rennicks.
Today, we caught up with Mark to learn more about his experiences working with us at The Pudding and Renatus’ journey as one of Ireland’s leading private equity firms.
1. Can you tell me about yourself and your business?
We are Renatus – a boutique private equity firm founded in 2014. Our main value-added is not just the money that we bring to business by investing, but between ourselves and our profile of clients, we’re all on the journey from good to great. The businesses that we have backed include Boojum, the Mexican chain restaurant. Rennicks is another; we do 80% of the car licence plates in the UK and Ireland. There is Simtech Aviation – Europe’s biggest private aviation training provider. We also have CRS, a modular refrigeration business. With Kappture, we do point of sales for food and beverage transactions in stadiums including Croke Park and Twickenham. We also work with Tipperary crystal, as well as AQF Medical.
From profiling targets to talent acquisition, we love to get stuck in and help businesses grow. We nurture functional excellence, so for example, if we see a business needs to hire someone, we will help them hire. If we see they need a brand assessment or brand development, we would call The Pudding, our expert partners in brand. We try to bring best practices in each of the functions and use our investors to help fill any gaps and grow the top line.
2. How did you first come to know
about and work with The Pudding?
We were looking to do a rebrand of Simtech Aviation, closely followed by brand development for Renatus. At the time, we were working with Siobhan O’Shea who was head of marketing at Simtech Aviation. It was Siobhan who recommended we work with Gillian Horan.
When Gillian and the team at The Pudding pitched for the project, their enthusiasm, knowledge of the business and general presence blew us away. We loved their case studies – particularly the work they did for Cogs and Marvel.
3. How did you find the process of working
with The Pudding when developing Renatus?
The Pudding definitely takes the time to understand the business first, which isn’t always the way. Getting underneath the skin of the business and understanding its drivers gives The Pudding a chance to really nail the brief, and that’s what they do. That’s something that sets The Pudding apart from other consultancies; they want to know what drives the business, what drives the top line; what drives employee engagement.
4. As a leader, what was your key learning
from working with The Pudding?
As for key learnings and outcomes, it would be focusing on the unique values within our business and utilising them on an ongoing basis to drive other things outside of the marketing department, such as our values of tenacity and love of SMEs. Using these values as directives, we hire our partners in our business and we review them according to our values.
5. What do you feel has been the most measurable
result of working with The Pudding?
For Renatus, our work with The Pudding enabled us to hone in on our values. By having them on our website, a prospective employee of one of our portfolio companies said it was the values that swayed him to go with us and not another employer that was chasing him at the time.
With one particular deal, we had done a values review, and off the back of that, we decided not to pursue it. The lack of values spoke to our willingness to walk away from the deal. The combination of the expertise and advice of The Pudding fused with our internal team enabled us to make these decisions.