Amplifying your Business through Thoughtful Investment Guidance (2024)

Investments are a vital process in any business. However, there are very few people who have gained expertise in this niche. Advising people to invest in the right business is indeed a challenging task and Maple Capital Advisors has aced it. Pankaj Karna, Founder & Managing Director is an experienced investment banker with over 22 year’s experience. He has worked in institutions like BNP Paribas, Rabobank and Grant Thornton prior to establishing Maple Capital Advisors. He has advised over 100 M&A, private equity and structured finance transactions in his career. Maple Capital Advisors completes 10 years in 2020 with a successful track record and has engaged with some of the best names in the industry.

With an interview with Insights Success, Pankaj and his team provide us with an overview of the challenges and success story of Maple Capital Advisors.

1. Being a successful business leader, what difficulties and challenges do you face? What keeps you motivated?

In our journey, we have faced challenges ranging from business slowdown and consequent stretch/delay on our deal outcomes to having faced stiff competition from a potential acquirer to significant staff churn at one point. We kept our heads down, continued to persevere and eventually recovered successfully and mitigated these risks today in terms of client diversity, market presence, staff mix and overall standing. Our Highest motivation is proven success in our engagements and adding value to our clients.

2. Brief about Maple Capital Advisors and its services and your vision for your company

Our vision is to establish as a premier pan India mid-market investment bank and early-stage investment firm highly focused non-new age entrepreneurs and new-age businesses especially in the consumer, financial services and technology domain.

Maple Capital Advisors is a premier mid-market investment bank focused on mergers & acquisitions, private equity-advising on mid-market private equity capital raise, accelerator-backing promising early-stage startups and leverage capital-advising on structured debt and corporate finance.

3. How do you motivate your team to be innovative and productive at work?

Our business is very goal and performance-orientated and hence outcomes define motivation very directly. This is the case in investment banking, successful mandate closures are directly related to motivation as all in team benefit from such outcomes, careerwise and monetarily.

4. What is your opinion regarding the current landscape of the market your company caters to?

In the current landscape, we are well-positioned as the go-to investment bank in mid-market in North India and we mostly compete with much larger players especially the Big 5. Nationally there are similar players as us in Mumbai Bangalore and Chennai. So we think we are regionally strong and emerging at the national level.

5. Please tell us about your achievements and accomplishments

We have consistently delivered successful mandates over the last 10 years and with our focus of engaging to create value we have had numerous repeat relationships that attest our ethos and track record. From the largest consolidation in the ceramic tiles industry(Bell Ceramics) in India to the largest M&A in Fitness(Fitness First) to the largest capital raise in coworking business(Awfis) in India are testimony to our track record and ability to deliver beyond our size.

We have featured multiple times in the league tables of top investment bankers in India by VC Circle. Was profiled by IBEF in its book ‘Ordinary Indians and Extraordinary Enterprise’, a book profiling 25 – 1^st generation entrepreneurs in India.

6. Where do you envision yourself and your company in the near future?

We see us emerging at the national level across multiple cities as a leading mid-market investment bank. We also plan to develop the early-stage investment thesis through a larger portfolio of proprietary investments and potentially managing a larger fund pool in this space in years to come.

7. What is your advice to the budding and aspiring entrepreneurs?

High perseverance and conviction coupled with pragmatism and being grounded pay well in the long term and success of the business. Working with the brightest and most motivated talent i