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European Private Equity Fund –Vice President, Investments
Optia secures a VP with M&A experience to help strengthen a private equity fund’s investment team.
Our client had set up operations in the Japanese market a couple of years prior to this search and already had a small team of investment professionals. In light of a large pipeline of potential deals, the client had decided to add another mid career level member to the investment team to support the additional deal flow. The challenge was to find a bilingual candidate who had a minimum of 6 years experience in M&A but preferably with principal investment experience.
Since the private equity market in Japan is less mature than many foreign markets, the pool of candidates with experience in MBO/LBO deals was limited. To start with we worked with the client to draw up a preliminary target list of firms to source candidates from. The target list consisted primarily of Japanese and foreign investment funds in addition to the principal investment groups at local and foreign capital financial institutions.
Since Optia had experience recruiting in this area in the past we already had an established network of potential candidates and knew exactly where to find additional talent if necessary. Leveraging our network we were able to receive a number of referrals additional to the people we already had on our list. The most appropriate candidate was a Senior Associate working at a foreign capital fund which was lacking the resources and commitment to succeed in Japan. He was referred to us by another candidate, which we had placed during a previous search. The candidate was a US educated, bilingual professional with a background in public accounting and 2 years experience in private equity investment. He was well qualified for the role and Optia worked closely with the client to secure the candidate and iron out final negotiations. Overall the process took less than 2 months.
The prospect of working on cross border deals between Japan and other Asian countries at a fund which was much more proactive in Japan was attractive to the candidate and he accepted the clients offer as Vice President immediately. Both the client and candidate were very happy and have since executed some of the most publicized private equity deals in Japan.
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