Overview: Dragon Performance Group
Black Dragon Capital is committed to supporting operating entrepreneurs, helping to create market-leading companies and providing proven tools that drive value at its portfolio companies. Accordingly, Black Dragon has created the Dragon Performance Group (DPG), a dedicated team of expert professionals that work alongside portfolio company senior management teams to help them realize their potential.
As a Black Dragon Capital affiliate, DPG helps portfolio company leaders shape a sustainable, performance-oriented culture within their enterprises. More broadly, DPG seeks to meet some of the most significant needs of the industries Black Dragon focuses on.
DPG leverages Black Dragon’s operational toolkit, comprised of the Black Dragon Leadership Index ™, the Black Dragon Playbook ™ and the Black Dragon Way™. These approaches have been refined and sharpened through Black Dragon leaders’ decades of operating experience.
Why Dragon Performance Group Exists
Dragon Performance Group grows out of our own experiences as entrepreneurs. Many investors promised to, and probably wanted to, help our cause. But they just didn’t have the tools or experience to help to help in a meaningful way. Other investors assigned passive former executives to us, and they didn’t have the economic incentive to dig in the way entrepreneurs do.
So Black Dragon created a program in which experienced executives, who are experts in their fields and know the pain, joy, sacrifice and challenges of leading a growth company, are financially incentivized to devote the time, energy and insight to working hand-in-hand with management teams – to actually do much of the work it takes to create value at a portfolio company.
The Dragon Performance Group Team
The Dragon Performance Group team is made up of strategic, financial, industry, managerial and operational experts, business leaders and market influencers. It provides expertise across an array of disciplines, including leadership assessment, market analysis, pricing and packaging, competitive analysis, technology and financial management.
Business Transformation – The Process
Black Dragon Capital’s ultimate goal for its portfolio companies is business transformation– going beyond improving revenue and reducing costs and doing what it takes to achieve market leadership. The Dragon Performance Group does this by applying Black Dragon’s proven and systematic toolkit to portfolio companies.
Here is how this work unfolds:
- DPG’s involvement starts well before any investment is made, working with the Black Dragon investment team to understand the investment thesis, dynamics and value-enhancement potential of a prospective portfolio company.
- After investment, DPG works with the company’s management team to set the strategic framework and use the Black Dragon toolkit to align people, plan and process.
- Throughout the transformation, the DPG team continues to share experiences, monitor the business and help measure results. There are weekly calls and monthly meetings, and DPG provides a continuous stream of suggestions and support to management but endeavors not to distract or intervene.
Other Benefits
Engaging with the Dragon Performance Group helps Black Dragon portfolio companies and their leaders:
- Enhance focuson what matters most.
- Access guidance and mentorship.
- Secure resources, like employees, partners or end customers, through doors that the DPG team can open.
- Improve results.
In the end, only a fellow entrepreneur who has worked in the same industry, with similar issues and challenges understand the sacrifice, loneliness and joy of building a market leading company that you can be proud of. We can’t promise that this will happen for all our management teams or our investments, but we’ll do everything we can to make it a reality.