After a rapid period of growth, Lebara’s previous shareholders put Lebara up for sale. To assist with the sale process, Lebara required highly experienced interim talent.
In particular, Lebara were looking for an individual to sit within their finance department who would be responsible for managing the financial data in relation to the sale. Lebara was looking for someone with due diligence experience to help prepare the business and guide the team, through the due diligence process.
Lebara contacted BIE to partner with them to provide an experienced interim who would support the due diligence of the transaction.
Providing this client-side support was integral to the success of the transaction because it ensured the BAU finance team had the necessary experience and support to carry out the due diligence process, acting as a support to link all the diligence streams.
BIE drew on their extensive network of experienced PE transaction professionals and introduced Sonia Kaypee for the role. Sonia had previous due diligence transaction experience, making her a perfect fit for the role.
Sonia explains her role at Lebara here: “I was able to leverage the breadth of deal experience by providing bandwidth across specialist tasks, such as modelling, helping to field vendor requests and anticipate potential pitfalls.
The team at Lebara were supportive in ensuring that during my engagement I was able to seamlessly insert myself into the business and work collaboratively, not only with the finance function but also with the commercial, legal, tax and international teams.
I was proactive in keeping the deal moving in the right direction and helped support various in-house teams from the worst of the time and work pressures, particularly for the finance function, who are always hit the hardest in these processes.”
Sonia’s support was integral to ensuring that the company was ready for an exit, which meant presenting their financial statements through the lens of due diligence, ensuring internal approval from all the finance directors and teams, which was crucial to aligning all the teams together.
Sonia worked with the Finance Director, Sam Inshaw, to create a diligence-related cash flow, which later became part of the business’s operational cash flow process, resulting in a lasting process improvement.
Sam describes the impact that Sonia made in the role here: “Sonia led the Due Diligence data gathering process, which was complex and involved multiple internal and external stakeholders across Finance, Legal, Tax, Technology and Commercial functions from 5 different geographies.
She quickly understood the business and our source data and established strong relationships with key individuals across the organisation to help source this data and present it in a Due Diligence friendly manner. In addition, she helped to simplify and automate internal reporting to embed the DD format cash flow into ongoing business operations to support any potential future exit events.”
The sale went through successfully when the new shareholder completed its acquisition of Lebara in November 2024.
