Knights and Squires excels in multiple areas of strategy advisory and private equity investments. Our approach employs novel thinking and customized solutions and capabilities. We provide clients with an excellent balance of decision analysis and speed of execution. We understand that bold moves can bring clients tremendous value, but only if backed up by intense research and strategic planning.

Strategy Advisory

• Corporate and Business Unit strategy advisory

  Knights and Squires works with executive teams to raise the level of strategic ambition, create clarity on the best strategic direction and shift resources towards the generation of superior value growth, putting in place the standards, accountabilities, and performance management systems for making it happen on a consistent basis.
  
  We work on a range of strategic issues including optimizing resource allocation across the portfolio, organic and inorganic growth strategies, strategic turnarounds or disposals, as well as individual product, brand, customer and market segment strategies.

• Megacapital projects management

  We partner with clients to enable capital projects delivery. We partner with local, provincial and national government, state-owned enterprises and private business.
  
  We do this by offering an integrated set of solutions in strategy development and capital planning, project implementation planning, procurement planning and monitoring, execution and risk & controls management, performance management and reporting and expenses optimization. All our services are supported by a proprietary enterprise software platform i-Track™.

• Turnaround and regeneration advisory

  From experience, we know that real life does not always adhere to an annual strategic planning cycle and from time to time companies go through states of severe distress that can manifest in overall firm underperformance.
  
  Whether brought on by an external event or internal shooting oneself in the foot, the rationale for a company’s strategic direction can change overnight. When market dynamics shift or unforeseen opportunities emerge, we work with CEO's and management teams to understand alternative paths and drive towards the refreshed targeted outcomes.
  
  We work on a range of areas for our clients to create turnaround or regeneration plans. We rapidly assess the extent of the current situation (both internal and market segment) and determine the future business viability and with urgency, implement emergency measures to stop the bleeding. Concurrently, we develop strategic survival plan across all business elements and implement with aggressive performance management and monitoring. Such areas include in-organic growth strategies, cost optimization strategies, revenue enhancement strategies, acquisition target identification and evaluation, transaction support and post-merger integration

• Strategy execution and value capture

  Knights and Squires works with Executives and their teams to turn a change in strategic direction into tangible actions and improved performance. We work with Executive sponsorship inside businesses to translate the new strategic direction into a transformation blueprint, mobilize the organization, steer the change effort, and maintain the execution standard required to ensure the optimal balance of pace, impact, and strategic consistency.

• Cost optimization

  Knights and Squires understands that cost advantage occurs when a firm has lower cumulative cost of performance relative to peers in all the value chain activities. Whether a firm is following cost leadership or differentiation, it needs to understand its cost position relative to peers. We assist firms need to carefully analyze how operating costs are aligned to activities in which they are incurred.
  
  We deliver meaningful strategic cost optimization by understanding the key cost optimization ingredients: (1) size and growth of expenses as represented by the activity (2) cost behavior of activities through their cost drivers and cost dynamics overtime (3) competitor differences in performing similar activity.
  
  Our typical cost optimization programs are structured to help companies improve performance and position themselves for successful future growth because we focus on cost transformation and the implementation of new operational strategies to provide high levels of performance, productivity, and efficiency.

• Business acceleration and commercialization
  We follow a structured process that captures the full growth potential of the new product offering by systematically linking research on customer needs to the product idea and properly differentiating these new products from existing market and own offerings. Our typical process consists of the following elements:
  
  
  • Generate high quality ideas - empower company “ideators” to self-assess ideas and outline their commercial applications to  get more high value ideas.
  • Speed to market - reduce overall cycle times by spending more time on idea refinement at the front end using facts.
  • Think through and design end-to-end product processes and technology implications.
  • Differentiation - engage an external (to the team) product innovation network to access technologies or processes that can create product differentiation. In addition, we are careful to create products that are more successful in the market and don’t cannibalize existing offerings.
  • Detailed financial valuation of the product idea.
  • Focus on creative “go to market” approaches.
  • On-time delivery - drive a sense of urgency across the organization around execution and delivery.
• Real Estate development and portfolio optimization

  Our real estate offering is targeted at two real estate sub sectors.
  
  New developments
  Knights and Squires offers whole lifecycle [pre-, during and post- development] Real Estate strategy advisory services ensuring alignment with market condition and regulations. These include land fact base, analysis and outline of plausible property development scenarios that are anchored in the underlying economic and industrial contexts. Following this first exercise, establish and operationalise SPVs for land and development and readying it to be management as a standalone entity as well and preparing development marketing plans and material [collateral], packaging the developments for sale and driving marketing campaigns to stakeholders.
  
  During actual real estate development, Knights and Squires manages and drives all development activities with professional teams and contractors underlined by innovation in design approach, construction methods and in materials and building systems. Post development management services include leasing and broking and provide efficient Facilities Management services.
  
  

  Existing portfolios
  

  Knights and Squires has a range of capabilities and competences to work with C-Suite and CREM Executives to develop and implement a Real Estate transformation plan that rapidly delivered results. Typically, we conduct a short diagnostic exercise with a view to ascertain the size and shape of the challenge. More importantly and drawing from our experience, we approach such exercises strategically as we view Real Estate as a true value generator for the business by a setting of integrated and reinforcing objectives that address both property and business level issues:

  • Rightsizing the Real Estate portfolio [owned and leased] by unscrambling a corporation from property leases that could be inconsistent, complex, costly and have little identification with the corporation’s brand and values. Besides reducing the number of and selecting desirable locations, we negotiate or exit from lease agreement with onerous terms, not aligned to funding, not aligned to corporate strategy and operating model;
  • Using Real Estate as a brand building tool - appropriately selected Real Estate locations, carefully designed workplaces and efficiently managed facilities contribute to brand and values entrenchment through positive experiences by clients, staff, investors and business partners;
  • Designing workplaces that provide room for innovation - carefully designing workplaces that encourage and support innovation. Crucially, Knights and Squires incorporates leading workspace design practices and activity based working insights and standards to create inspiring working atmospheres;
  • Solving for staff satisfaction and productivity improvement - workplace decisions based on increasing employee satisfaction in turn increase financial returns through greater productivity, efficiency, innovation, lower rates of absenteeism and much more. We therefore imbed this aspect into decision criteria for site selection, workplace design and facility management standards;
  • Increasing flexibility and agility - besides designing the workspaces for flexibility and adaptability, we also restructure lease arrangements in a manner that match the duration of business needs that would allow a corporation to only pay for space that is optimal for the prevailing business operations. In this way, Knights and Squires enable corporations to have options to exit specific locations as market conditions change;
  • Reducing costs - besides subletting, mothballing and reversing past lease agreements to current market rates, we also look at costs associated with facilities management. These include co-locating business units into logical neighborhoods, occupying the most cost efficient buildings, increasing quality and timing of facilities maintenance to avoid costly repairs and capital expenditures and establishing a new Facilities Management operating model that in turn reduces costs associated with procurement of real estate related services by negotiating lower rates.

Asset Management

Knights and Squires is a growing operational manager and investor focusing on starting own or acquiring equity interests primarily in South African companies and assets. The firm core objective is to generate returns commensurate with the risk taken and we achieve this by targeting companies and assets that either show high growth potential or are strong market leaders in their sectors and require our capital as well as strategic value add to fulfil their growth potential.


• Have competitive business model with a sustainable moat and current leadership capabilities.
• Are highly cash generative to enhance growth, obtain and reduce acquisition debt and distribute dividends to shareholders.
• Offer attractive fair acquisition prices relative to growth prospects of the target investee companies while being astute enough to build in risk mitigating structures with a view to minimize potential equity losses.
• Ready for us to exert strategic influence by taking an active strategic leadership role in the companies to promote, inter alia, growth, operational efficiencies, risk management, financial management, financial restructuring, corporate governance considerations such as succession planning, systems enhancement, ESG, and transformation.
• Can deliver multi horizon results - while we take a long term views on our investments we also remain attuned to possible short term market dynamics and therefore set clear exit options and strategies such as an initial public offering, trade sale, secondary market, management buyout and possibly roll-over within a seven to ten year investment horizon.