During the credit crunch tens of thousands of good long established businesses have gone bust. These businesses are often sold off for pence in the pound to people in the know or sometimes back to the original management. Robert Wildmore and his associates identified dozens of such opportunities and in 2009 self financed 2 deals these are outlined in the prospectus as Project Falkor' and Project Balaur'. In both of these deals even after all the investment and turnaround costs in excess of 100% returns where achieved within 12 months by remarketing the businesses for sale
With the mantra you should never let a good recession go to waste' ringing in their ears and a huge pipeline of deals ready to go, Robert decided to team up with the business turnaround consultancy River Management LLP, raise some funding with the sale of shares in DASPV and go after the market in a truly wholesale fashion. In a market with literally hundreds of thousands of potential targets, DASPV can afford to carefully select the deals with a minimum downside and maximum upside.
Investors are invited to buy shares in order to complete phases of investments, each phase will raise 800,000 sterling this will be topped up to 1.2m by the DASPV team and be used to buy businesses with an estimated post turnaround market value of 2m at a discount through a network of introducers and insolvency practitioners that have been nurtured for many years. On average each phase will buy 6 businesses although this can vary. No more than 30% of funds will be committed to a single business so as to split the risk. The aim of the DASPV is to exit each phase within 12 months and return the capital plus profits to the shareholders. If we assume that we only achieve half of target that would still provide a return on investment of over 30%.
In a recession gripped economy this surely is the best hedge against falling investments, to actively invest in the upside of businesses failing, at the same time saving jobs and reputations of Britain's small businesses.