Selim Loukil joined Advent in 2012 and is a Managing Director in London. He leads the Portfolio Support Group. Selim has worked with 15 private equity portfolio companies during his career, nine while at Advent.
Prior to joining Advent, Selim spent four years in operating roles at HMY, a portfolio company of Sagard Private Equity Partners. At HMY, Selim was Chief Transformation Officer, and subsequently served as Divisional CEO, leading the turnaround of the Specialty business unit. Prior to joining HMY, he spent eight years as a management consultant at Bain & Co. in France and the U.S., and before that, with Cap Gemini. Selim began his career as a Business Development Manager in the water treatment industry, where he worked for Rhodia in Italy.
Selim graduated from Ecole Centrale, France with a MSc. in Mechanical Engineering and received an MBA from HEC Business School in Paris.
How has the Portfolio Support Group (PSG) evolved?
Over the years Advent has become far more active in our partnership with leadership teams. Around a dozen years ago, Advent acknowledged that with an increase in investment size and complexity, we needed to bring into the firm a group of leaders whose role will be to support our leadership team in the transformation of the businesses. It’s a tough job for a management team to, at the same time, manage a business day-to-day as well as transforming it to deliver the investment thesis. Advent wanted to have bench of seasoned executives who are ex-management consultants, able to crack any business challenge, as well as PE-savvy operators who know what it takes to lead change in an organization and could sit at the table with the CEO from day one to provide the right level of support and challenge.
How does Advent’s collaborative model drive impact at portfolio companies?
The essence of our model is that Advent partners with our CEOs and their teams, bringing to the table three types of individuals, each looking at the world through a slightly different lens, and this brings diversity of thought. You have a team member, a Portfolio Support Group member, and an Operating Partner – I call it the troika. The team brings sector knowledge and strategic oversight. The PSG team are experts in how to transform a business. And the Operating Partner is a respected industry figure who is super-knowledgeable on the thesis to execute. This brings diversity of thought which leads to better decisions.
“The essence of our model is that we partner with our CEOs and their teams bringing to the table three types of individuals, each looking at the world through a slightly different lens, and this brings diversity of thought.”
Selim Loukil
Managing Director, Advent
How do you learn from mistakes, and help your colleagues to do so?
I see our team as playing a fundamental role in knowledge sharing, particularly about things that have gone wrong. We regularly run a ‘lessons learned’ session on team calls, involving partners and directors from the team and PSG team. We discuss what things have worked for us, and more importantly, what didn’t work as well. These sessions are important not only in terms of establishing best practices, but also looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, ‘how do we do a better job next time?’ It’s part of our culture, that focus on continuous improvement.
What has changed in the industry?
The overall context is that the days of cheap money are over, therefore, we have to do more. And, we must do more over a longer period of time, because the average holding period in private equity has substantially increased over the years. That means driving the portfolio harder by paying more attention to the basics. Those basics are getting the right organization and the right team, setting up the right governance, being very clear on the investment thesis and value creation levers, and then executing each of those levers to reach full potential.
What do you enjoy doing outside working hours?
One of my passions is spearfishing. I belong to a club in London that has a membership of 200 people, and we get together several times a year. You get to spend quality time with people from very diverse backgrounds and nationalities. There’s of course the adrenaline thrill of catching a fish, but this is less than 1% of the total time. It’s all about immersing oneself in nature, being in an almost meditative state while freediving in the water, disconnecting from everything else and eventually then bringing food home, cooking it, and having a nice dinner!
