Published on January 8, 2024
Hi there,
We hope you all enjoyed a warm end of the year 2023 with family and friends. We have the impression that 2023 flew by at record speed.
As we launched Newion 4 in October 2022, 2023 was packed with research and initial investments into new companies like Ellie, delphai, and airfocus, while also continuing investing in the existing portfolios of Newion 3 and 4. Although the markets have shifted significantly, we are happy to see that Q4 was earmarked with a sustained uptick in deal flow that we first identified in Q3 2023. The dust has settled on the increased interest rates, lowered valuations, and changes in growth and profitability expectations. The “new new normal” is identified and acknowledged by founders and investors and together we can look forward to a bright future filled with opportunity.
We are proud that TaxModel found a new home with Tax Systems and will be able to continue delivering value to its customers and the broader customer base of Tax Systems.
Recently we welcomed Lisa-Maria Rübsam and Zino ten Kate to the team as principal and intern. Lisa-Maria joins us from the fast-growing German scale-up Delivery Hero, where she was responsible for strategic partnerships. Zino joined us as intern and will continue working for us in the coming months on a part-time basis while finishing his degree.
As a knowledge-sharing piece for this quarter, we would like to share with you a sneak peek of our extensive strategy ideation deck. Please reach out to receive the full deck and discuss its contents.
We are looking forward to a fruitful 2024.
Warm regards,
The Newion Team
💼 Portfolio News
➡️Taxmodel: Exit
On December 11th, we announced the exit of Taxmodel. Initially, we invested in the company in 2018, as one of the first investments for the then-new Newion 3 fund. The company is bought by the UK company Tax Systems. Taxmodel will add significant new capabilities to the Tax Systems software portfolio and boost their presence across 25 additional countries. Please read the press release here.
🎪 Events
We’ll be traveling a lot in Q1 so please reach out to schedule something near you soon!
🤓 From Mision to Tactics
Insights by Newion
In the past couple of months, we have been revamping our strategy ideation deck which we use often during strategy sessions with portfolio and prospective portfolio companies. In this section we would like to offer you a sneek peak into the document. If you are interested in receiving the full deck, do not hesitate to reach out to one of the team members. We’re happy to provide it and discuss its content with you!
In the above slide we outline the trajectory to go from the company’s mission to tactics to execute on the decided strategy.
Vision and Strategy – No 2 companies are created equal. Every company is built by a unique set of founders, with a unique vision and mission. The key to success for any organization is to start properly assessing one’s mission, vision, and ambition of the founders and greater team.
Positioning
Positioning – Once you have identified the mission, vision and ambition of the team, you can start identifying the current positioning of your company/product within the greater ecosystem in which you operate. Your positioning is identified by many components, such as:
- Brand positioning
- Position within the workflow you try to capture
- Feature set of your product vs those of other players and what the customers desire.
- Current Product-Market combination
Each of these components should enable you to be in a unique and sustainable competitive advantage compared to the competition. If not, or not enough to meet your ambitions, you should come up with a strategy to get in that winning zone ==>
Strategy
Strategy – The key to any successful scaling story is a good and sustainable growth strategy. In the slide above we tried to identify both the qualitative and quantitative components of a growth strategy.
Tactics
Once you identified a strategy that suits your mission and ambition to get into the winning zone of your competitive landscape, you should translate this strategy into tactics spanning every department of your company. This is where you go into the nitty gritty of identifying KPIs that count, define the data that is required to compose these KPIs, and write down tactics that will enable you to optimize on these KPIs. In the extended deck, we go deep into this and highlight important KPIs that could count for you in your organization, but again, no 2 companies are the same and hence, the KPIs that count for your company and your growth strategy should be selected carefully.
Interested to learn more? Please reach out to one of the team members to read more 🙂
