Bradley Associates: Corporate Funding

Seasoned professionals who have extensive experience undertaking corporate finance transactions from within business consultancy practices run our Business Funding department.

Bradley Associates can supply business operations with assistance in business plans and also pass on management advice in support of applications for corporate finance. We are able to bring real and applicable knowledge to almost any type of corporate finance project.

Type of Corporate Finance Project

Business Growth and Expansion
Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions
Corporate Reorganization
Business Sales

Bradley Associates conduct a policy of targeting our services toward a specific business demographic. Consequently, the lion’s share of our clients, operate businesses with annual turnovers that range from $500k to $10m.

This covers small family businesses right through to subsidiaries of large multinationals. Financing arranged can therefore vary significantly from $50k for a small refinance through to $15m for a management buyout, merger or an acquisition. Bradley Associates have access to a trusted network of lenders who are able to provide access to a plethora of forward-thinking and aggressive plans that Bradley Associates can introduce into corporate agreements. Over the years experience has shown us that in many cases companies are either with unsuitable lenders or the structure of any package provided have insufficient versatility to meet their demands.

In such cases Bradley Associates will endeavor to refinance the existing property with the co-operation of both the lender and the client. With the consent of the client company and, of course, subject to the permission of the existing lender, Bradley Associates will aim to refinance all of the outstanding requirements.

Clients who engage in the identification of and the subsequent making of moves towards possible targets for acquisition often retain Bradley Associates. In these cases, we undertake to arrange the appropriate finance necessary to finance the acquisition.

Venture Capital

In our experience, our success has been based on backing the right management team. We’ve learned that we have to work with entrepreneurs who we trust, respect and enjoy being around. We’ve all been entrepreneurs and take some measure of pride in understanding the company-building process and the personality it takes to do it well.

The best way to deliver value, as a partner to an entrepreneur is to be focused in his/her sector, and bring a network of connections and an educated perspective. We would never presume to know more than one of our teams about their industry, but we do have the ability to see the entire landscape from our vantage point.

Every company has risks, however modest or audacious its goals. While those risks tend to dissipate with maturity, they never go away. Given this, our preference is to fund companies where, if we all succeed, we have a chance to create an extremely valuable enterprise. That’s not to say that one shouldn’t have a niche strategy at the outset, to establish some market penetration, but ultimately we like to back entrepreneurs solving big problems.

We think it’s in everyone’s best interest to have our portfolio companies matter to us. Our goal is to own at least 20% of each of our portfolio companies, which means that we have a serious stake in their success. We understand that this means we have to take the risks associated with coming in early, and we welcome that.

The other major factor that emerges when we analyze our past successes and failures is where venture capital investors squabble amongst themselves, or disagree on strategy or fundraising tactics. This can bring a good company down. We therefore like to invest alongside groups that we know, and whose behavior we have some ability to understand and predict.

Investment Criteria

Bradley Associates invests in promising seed and early stage opportunities identified by its investment professionals as well as the local managers of its Partner Funds. We seek investments that have the following characteristics:

Management Team: Experienced and passionate Business and / or Technical Leadership.
Market: A substantial market opportunity with attractive distribution and consolidation attributes.
Product / Service: A technology that provides for a product or service that can generate strong margins and long term differentiation within the target market Business Model: a well thought out and appropriate business model to address the market.
Stage: Seed (no revenue, prototype product, incomplete team) through Early Stage (less than $10M in sales, still needs to build out team, full sales and marketing infrastructure, second and third iterations of product offerings).
Partnership: We seek to partner closely with excellent entrepreneurs. Historically, we have helped our companies assemble talented management teams, and in some cases, we have played the role of founding investor, starting companies with proven entrepreneurs. Our greatest value is when a company can benefit from an investment partner who can help build the team, structure the business model, refine the product roadmap, and raise subsequent rounds of capital from firms in the traditional venture centers. We have proven our skills at working with leading business and technical entrepreneurs to achieve their goals, and we continue this effort with each new investment partnership.