Project Description
Blixt Group
Blixt is an entrepreneurial Private Equity firm which is dedicated to partnering with small, private organisations across Europe to build exceptional, high-growth companies that thrive.
The founder is a great believer that the business should have best-in-class people practices as an important foundational pillar on which the firm’s investment performance rests. Therefore, he wanted to ensure that the firm gave time and attention to hiring, onboarding and developing people within the organisation.
How People Business works with Blixt
People Business works with Blixt delivering a quarterly cycle of activity – development workshops and coaching as well as advice on developing people practices. This spans a wide range of focused effort to support the organisation’s growth.
In the last 18 months we have delivered a number of people interventions, for example:
- Team development workshops using MBTI – enabling team members to identify their natural strengths and preferences and reflect on how they can use these insights to work more effectively especially in the high-pressure situation of getting deals over the line. Additionally, they use the insights to connect more effectively with management teams in their portfolio and those they meet in pursuit of new opportunities,
- Soft skills training workshops on influencing, pitching, presenting and running effective meetings – In each case a bespoke workshop was created to meet the needs of a developing investment team using examples based on realistic simulations of the job. For example, the presentation skills training was based largely on presenting an effective pitch to management.
We also actively support the hiring of new team members using psychometric profiling and assessment techniques to help assess a candidate’s ability, personality preferences and therefore fit with the rest of the team. We take care to debrief the candidates to validate the psychometric profiles before feeding back to the firm and have often found that this has helped candidates to see that the firm’s focus on great people practices is not just something that is talked about but is genuine and starts from the moment a candidate is being interviewed. The profiling also provides rich insight that enables Blixt to think about creating diverse teams with people who think and operate differently.
What our client said
“People Business are an invaluable expert partner. They understand what makes investment firms work and deliver a bespoke service getting to know our team and our approach to investing. Their flexibility means they can grow their contribution as we scale.”