hello and welcome to our presentation titled why is there a whale of silence the exploration of
the search fund phenomenon recently the private equity phenomenon of search funds continues to
gain further momentum within the industry and media current statistics indicate a
record growth of search funds worldwide for 2019 there are 286 cases involved into the procedure
furthermore the number of search fund success stories within the media are increasing as well
this leads us to our first question what is a search fund the model generally involves
a young individual named the serger who convinces a group of investors to finance its quest to find
a suitable firm with succession problems the aim of the searcher is to become the successor of the
retiring ceo however despite the increasing number of search funds and media coverage
research has paid very limited attention to this phenomenon
there is no theoretical foundation to explain search funds and the underlying processes
this led us to the formulation of our research questions we want to explore the phenomenon
of search funds and clarify the question who interacts with whom and why within the model
based on those investigations we want to explain which theoretical concepts can help to encode and
establish search funds within theory to reach this target our data is derived from a series of 21
in-depth and semi-structured interviews which were analyzed by using grounded theory mythology
our findings indicate that extending the view of current pe reports we discovered and propose
an eight-stage search fund process which contains the most relevant milestones shows
the involved parties and the interactions of the parties within every process step
this enabled us to draw connections to other theories of management based on our observations
we contribute to the field of entrepreneurial opportunities principal agent and family firm
succession first we reveal search funds to be a real entrepreneurial opportunity
in which searchers function as entrepreneurs second and in contrast to traditional private
equity transactions search funds are revealed to reduce agency conflict significantly leading to
lower agency costs for the principal and third we reveal searches to have some characteristics
with internal family succession candidates which challenges the perception of searchers as external
candidates therefore searches are proposed to be an advantages hybrid succession mechanism which
enriches the family firm succession literature we hope to see you at our presentation slot in june