Q: Who do you serve in joint ventures? One partner? All partners? The JV CEO and management team?
A: Our deal work tends to be on behalf of a single company – usually one of the parent companies, but sometimes a JV that is considering a transaction.
Our JV governance and management work (e.g., our health and performance assessment) tends to be done for the joint venture and the Board of Directors, serving all partners equally.
In our experience, the most effective way to improve joint venture performance is to serve as an independent and objective advisor to all partners. Impact comes from identifying critical changes that can improve performance and shaping recommendations with input from all shareholders.
Q: How long is a typical engagement, and how do you serve clients?
A: Our engagements vary in length based on complexity and client urgency. As an example, our deal-check work typically requires 2-4 weeks, while our JV Health and Performance Assessment engagement can span from 8-12 weeks.
Q: How does Water Street differ from traditional consulting firms?
A: Water Street’s engagement model differs from the traditional consulting approach in several ways. Our highly experienced consultants lead the work and our proprietary tools allow us to collect a very targeted set of facts in a minimally invasive way. We do not typically staff full teams for extended periods; rather we use a senior-heavy and tool-intensive engagement approach.
Our focus on JVs, consortia, and other complex partnerships, and our approach allow us to deliver significant value in a very cost-effective way.
Q: How many joint ventures are in your database?
A: Water Street Partners’ proprietary database contains comprehensive health and performance data on more than 100 joint ventures. All of the data has been collected in the past 24 months and spans industries and geographies.
Q: Is my joint venture’s information confidential?
A: All non-public client information, data, and materials given to Water Street Partners in the course of an engagement or advisory service, are completely confidential. Individual conversations with the team are never attributed or otherwise recognizable to anyone under any circumstance, without explicit permission. All data is housed in a secure, proprietary database.
Q: How can you have impact, as a relatively small firm?
A: We have the largest, deepest staff of JV experts in the world, the most well-developed toolkits, and a proprietary database of more than 100 joint ventures. We manage our client capacity to serve a handful of clients at a time, deeply, with the best teams in the world.