Keely Woodley is the first woman to lead Grant Thornton’s corporate finance team. She discusses deals, diversity and the difficulties of virtual communication

Teams are mentioned a lot during our interview with Keely Woodley, head of corporate finance advisory at Grant Thornton. And she’s not talking about Microsoft’s online meeting platform – she means real-life corporate finance teams.

Last November, Woodley became the first woman to lead Grant Thornton’s corporate finance team. There’s been no rest – the start of 2021 has been incredibly busy for deals. “As 2020 dawned, we thought we had come through the ongoing uncertainty, with numerous general elections and impending Brexit,” she says. “There was quite a lot of pent-up demand as a result and we were off to an absolute flying start. It was the biggest quarter we’d ever had in corporate finance. Then, of course, everything went to dust.

“But when we were very much in the doldrums last year, we couldn’t have foreseen that our corporate finance team would have just had the busiest five months in our firm’s history.”

The firm has been particularly busy in healthcare and education. Woodley recently completed the carve-out of an education and training business and expects such activity to be a significant source of deals for private equity over the next year or two. She sees many factors driving mainstream M&A: COVID-19 catch-up, potential capital gains tax changes – and owner-managers thinking that, after the past year, it’s time to sell.

Acquiring technology is also a big driver, and Woodley expects restructuring and refinancing to figure large over the coming year, which will drive deals, too.

At the sharp end

Woodley is very proud of her working class roots. Born and brought up in Essex, she was the first member of her family to go to university – Brunel – where she studied economics and business finance. “I was that person who was holding down two jobs all the way through and had help from the hardship fund,” she says. After graduating, she joined 3i – one of only two graduates to be taken on that year: “It was quite a shock to actually get the place.” She wanted to do the ACA exams outside of practice, but the only alternative to the large professional services firms that she was aware of was London Transport. Based in London, she worked in valuations for three years. “3i very much focused on the mid-market and SMEs. I was there for five years. I moved across to work with the portfolio companies after qualifying, as I wanted to be more involved at the sharp end of things.”

Doing deals

In 2005, she began looking at her options. She had a few offers, from HSBC and the Big Four, but decided to join Grant Thornton. “I could see an entrepreneurial spirit at the firm,” she says. “I remember talking to the investment bankers at other organisations; they said it would be a while before I met a client. I wanted to get involved straight away and didn’t really want to be sat in a back room somewhere, going through documents 18 hours a day.”

In the 16 years she has spent in Grant Thornton’s corporate finance lead advisory team, it has grown tenfold from a team of 12 to around 120, and is still growing.
Back then, she says, Grant Thornton –like most of the M&A market – was much more of a generalist adviser. “That was the skillset people were buying into back in 2005,” she says. “They wanted someone who knew how to put a deal together and structure it, be it a trade sale or a private equity-backed MBO or a finance raise.”

The first deal she advised on was the sale of a financial treasury conferences business to the Economist Group – the first deal they’d done in over a decade. Next was the sale of gaming company Empire Interactive to NASDAQ-listed cash shell, Silver Star.

By 2007, Woodley could see that sector knowledge and experience was becoming an important aspect of winning mandates. The team had built up some experience in events and media. Business support services was a hot sector – as it still is – and she decided to focus on the growing facilities management sector.

“Facilities management companies such as Mitie were very much going on a buy-and-build spree at that point, and we had some really good success stories in that sector and sold a couple of businesses, including Environmental Property Services to Mitie, and Axis Security, a manned guarding specialist provider, to Sovereign Capital.”

Having built up Grant Thornton’s business services M&A specialism, Woodley then took time out to have her daughter. At the time, David Ascott led the corporate finance department. Woodley says he was ahead of the curve when it came to flexible working, enabling her to balance family and work life. When she returned, part-time, she began to focus on human capital business services – recruitment, education, consultancy and training. “We’ve now done around 30 deals in the past five years in that sector alone,” she says.

Rising force

Grant Thornton, like many firms, is focusing on inclusion and diversity. Its Elevate programme aims to bring more female talent through to senior levels.

“It’s particularly challenging to encourage women into the M&A world because the perception is that it has hard hours, making it difficult to balance work with a family life,” says Woodley. “I think we will get more women to senior levels through what we’re doing, but there’s always more we can do.”

The firm is also taking a lead in its approach to social mobility and is recruiting school leavers directly into corporate finance. “There are certain things you can change quickly. We really value different perspectives and don’t want to be bound by taking people with certain qualifications and backgrounds. Some of our top performers joined us from school at 18,” she explains.

Woodley recognises that drive is a key component of a corporate financier’s make-up. “It’s about recruiting attitude and skills, rather than just academic points. That’s something I feel really passionate about and, when we’re dealing with our clients, it’s very important that we reflect and represent the teams that we get the privilege of working with. I truly believe that diversity can help to improve your business’ bottom line, as well as having huge societal impact.”

Vertical challenge

Today, Woodley’s forward-looking approach to setting up a successful human capital M&A service runs through her team.

“Being curious about the underlying industries helps improve our understanding of where the next growth markets will be and enables us to be more agile. We look for sector verticals, and I don’t think there are many people who’ve done that in the mid-market as extensively as we have.”

Clearly, in this area of the M&A market, Grant Thornton is one of the bigger players, with strong coverage across healthcare, business services and education, industrials, technology, financial services and food and consumer. The firm has a really strong regional presence and there are 13 partners – many of whom have been with the firm at least 10 years – across the country.

Of the other 12 partners, in London, Usman Malik heads up business services; Andy Morgan heads technology, media and telecoms (TMT); Peter Jennings, private healthcare; Philip Secrett manages the public company M&A team.

Darren Bear and Mike Tillson are based in Cambridge; Bear is responsible for representing the broader deals and business consulting business (in which the corporate finance team sits), at board level. 

John Bryant heads up the East Midlands M&A team in Nottingham. Neil McInnes leads the Scotland corporate finance team in Glasgow; Nick Gillott leads the Birmingham office and has expertise in industrials and automotive. Trefor Griffith leads the Bristol corporate finance team and is head of consumer and food and beverages; in Manchester Peter Terry focuses on private equity, and leading the North West region, too.

Anuj Chande focuses on South Asia. “He is very experienced and is our real conduit into a lot of Indian-based businesses,” says Woodley. “He has more than 30 years of experience and so has built some fantastic relationships.

“Having a large team that is geographically spread works brilliantly for our clients, who get local relationships and support while being able to draw on valuable national sector knowledge from the outset.”

Corporate finance sits within a broader deals and business consulting offering, which lets the team tap into a wider talent pool, including specialists in financial due diligence, valuations and modelling, special projects, restructuring and debt advisory. And Mo Merali, head of transaction services and private equity, is also chairman of ICAEW’s Corporate Finance Faculty.

Corporate finance advisory is still growing – there are plans to recruit more than 20 people over the next six months, from newly qualified to senior hires.

Getting back together

The past year has given Grant Thornton a great deal of insight about how to effectively manage a deal virtually, and the best approach. In the future, Woodley says, it will be a matter of picking the method of communication that works best for both their people and their clients: “That may be Zoom or a face-to-face meeting – or there are times when a phone call really is best.”

For someone so focused on the team, Woodley says she has really missed the camaraderie and the chance to celebrate completing a deal with colleagues and clients. One deal was completed at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon, (“after three false finishes”) and she celebrated by making pasta for her daughter and doing some gardening.

The process has become very transactional, she says, and it takes longer to get to the end point than if those involved were thrashing a deal out around a table. Things can be lost in translation and suddenly manifest in the commercial outcomes, and relatively small issues can suddenly become much more amplified because of that.

“The fact is, certain issues can take longer to resolve,” Woodley says. “Always being online means you can lose that bit of humour or warmth that can help overcome an issue. You need to be there and able to read body language and then, through experience, to learn what that is telling you.”