An operator's view of value creation.

Mark Fulford

Mark has spent his career inside the businesses that private equity backs, not just alongside them. As an operating partner at Hg he worked with more than twenty B2B software companies, most often on the question that decides the outcome of an investment: will the growth in the plan actually be delivered?

Over that time he built a set of methods for answering it early. A way of establishing an honest baseline. A way of testing whether a target is real. A scoring model that reads every function of a business on the same terms. Kuden is those methods, codified.

Why the name

Kuden (口伝) is a Japanese term for teaching passed on directly, from practitioner to practitioner, rather than learned from a manual. It is how most of what matters in operating a business is actually learned. It is also the title of Mark's forthcoming book on execution.

Background

• Operating partner at Hg, working across more than twenty B2B SaaS portfolio companies
• Non-executive director on the boards of PE-backed software businesses
• Go-to-market specialist: pipeline, forecasting, sales capacity and revenue operations
• Author of a forthcoming book, Kuden, on the discipline of execution