Changing times

What impact did the latest fundraising have on your role?
I spend less than 50 percent of my time on the ?traditional?CFO function ? the remainder goes on involvement in the fundraising process. The number of LPs in our new fund increased by 50 percent from Fund V. The other major difference was in the amount of side letters ? maybe one third of investors in Fund IV got a side letter and that number was probably 80 percent in Fund V. And whereas before a side letter might have been two or three pages long, now an eight or nine page side letter isn't unusual.

What brought you to Advent in 1987?
Peter Brooke had spun Advent out of TA Associates in 1984 to set up an international private equity business, about which many people were skeptical. The business started out as a small venture firm effectively, and when Peter raised his first institutional fund in 1987, he needed someone to run the financial side of things. I had no background in the industry, but that didn't matter, very few others at that time had either. No one was quite sure what the role would encompass as the international private equity business was really in its infancy ? there were probably only around 20 people at Advent back then.

What was the main remit of your role in those days?
I really did whatever came up that didn't have to do with making an investment. There were no templates for things like treasury, tax, reporting, any of that. A lot of the time we didn't know exactly what we were doing. But we've always had good people administering our funds and we've added more strong people to the team over time. The main problem was that no one was doing anything similar at the time and our business grew very quickly to 14 offices. Much of the traditional CFO function at the beginning is currently delegated, but I'm fortunate to be able to do that.

Whatwere the operational challenges in building a global network of offices?
Probably the hardest thing was getting the interface between the administration team and the operations of the business right. On the admin side, we had to begin to understand regulations in jurisdictions all over the world. In lots of those places, private equity was brand new and largely misunderstood. Private equity was pigeonholed into rules designed for different business models. As a result, we had to put together some pretty strange constructions to make deals work and we had to learn to co-invest with our affiliate companies.

What have been the main inflexion points for you as CFO within Advent?
I would say that these have all been linked to the firm's development. We've gone through a number of pretty major changes that have impacted on my role. In the beginning we were a VC-type organization:a small group of partners interested in doing deals, led by a founder with credibility in the market. As we developed an international network of affiliates, we diverged from other venture firms and I had to become knowledgeable in areas that most other CFOs didn't have to deal with. Putting our own people into countries was a change, too, in terms of setting up overseas subsidiaries. Around 1991, we had to begin running Advent as a global organization rather than a Boston-based venture firm and there was the attendant heartburn of going through that change. When Peter Brooke retired in the mid-90s, we moved to a CEO model and became more hierarchical.

Another key challenge in the mid-90s was our expansion into emerging markets like Central & Eastern Europe and Latin America. Operating in those regions was a throwback to the early days ? basic legal infrastructure and limited private equity knowledge ? and we had to work around what was there. Finally, four years ago, we went from the CEO model to the executive committee model, which is less hierarchical and more collegial. I now sit on that executive committee as the only member not managing an investment business.