2020 Year in Review: The RLH Perspective
Looking back on a most difficult year, we would like to share a bit of good news, courtesy of the management teams of our portfolio companies. We are very pleased to report that our portfolio companies (none of which manufacture or distribute hand sanitizer or paper towels) collectively increased their total number of employees from January 1 to December 31, 2020 by about 2% notwithstanding the pandemic, civic unrest, and all the other challenges of the year gone by.
We credit this wonderful outcome to the people-centric philosophy of our management teams and to the financial flexibility afforded to them by RLH’s low-leverage approach to transaction structures. Although the private equity industry often receives bad press, we believe that RLH’s style of investing is a vehicle to provide the employees of our portfolio companies with opportunity, and our employment results in 2020 confirm that.
While retaining talent in the portfolio was at the top of our 2020 list of accomplishments, there were several other notable milestones over the past 12 months:
We welcomed a new member to our family of portfolio companies via our investment in MCA Connect, a leading provider of cloud transformation solutions for complex manufacturing enterprises. MCA brings to its clients an unparalleled level of understanding of high-complexity production processes together with deep expertise in Microsoft’s D365 and Azure technologies.
We added four very talented investment professionals to the RLH team. We are proud and pleased to welcome Yumee Song, Ari Adler, and Tucker Stolberg to our ranks. They bring broad experience and perspectives that will undoubtedly make us better investors.
Our portfolio company Illuminate acquired Paccelerate, a software technology business based in Silicon Valley that is highly synergistic to one of Illuminate’s core solution offerings for the intelligence community.
Our portfolio company Utegration completed the acquisition of HPC America, a provider of consulting services and software which incorporate specialized expertise related to the regulatory reporting obligations of utilities.
Our portfolio company Inspirag enhanced its ability to help clients implement the full suite of Oracle ERP Cloud applications by acquiring Vertical Edge Consulting Group, a leading full-service Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) consulting firm.
Our portfolio company Clarity Insights was acquired by Accenture, a leading global professional services company. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Chicago, Clarity provides data science and AI/ML engineering capabilities for large enterprises, and serves as a strategic partner to clients across a range of industries, particularly healthcare, financial services and insurance. Clarity grew significantly over the past five years while earning recognitions from Gartner and Forrester as well as numerous awards as a Best Place to Work.
We significantly broadened our team of Strategic Advisors by the addition of three very experienced executives Ethan Arnold, Ken Graboys, and Virginia McFerran. Their insights will make RLH smarter in all aspects of our investment activities and we are grateful for their contributions.
We look forward to welcoming more middle-market firms into our portfolio in 2021 and invite your referrals of entrepreneurial management teams that are building market-leading, high-growth, profitable businesses in the $25 – 150 million revenue range within the sectors of business services, healthcare, and government services. On behalf of the entire RLH team, we hope that 2021 is a good year for you and all the people who make your business endeavors successful!