Continuserve offers advisory services, accounting, and IT solutions to help businesses reduce cost and implement best practices in finance and technology. CEO Pradeep Khurana shares more details with us in an exclusive interview with Techbullion.
Please tell us your name and a little more about yourself?
My name is Pradeep Khurana and I’m one of the founders and the managing director of Continuserve LLC. I’ve been involved in building and managing tech-enabled services businesses for most of my career.
ContinuServe provides outsourced back-office solutions to private equity-backed portfolio companies with a focus on carve-outs.
I was also the founder of Surebridge, Inc., a company started in 1996 and a pioneer in the software as a service industry. I served as chairman, co-president, and co-CEO of the firm. I was also part of the founding team of i-Cube, a systems integration firm headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts which filed a successful IPO.
I received a B.A. from Wesleyan University where I graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I also received my MBA from Harvard Business School.
What is ContinuServe and what unique services do you provide at ContinuServe?
ContinuServe provides outsourced back-office solutions. We do a lot of the behind-the-scenes ‘grunt’ work that companies need to run: paying vendors, sending out customer bills, closing the books. We provide the technology and expert labor to perform all these activities as a service.
Please tell us more about your carve-out services; What is it and how does ContinuServe help with carve-out transitions?
When a large company divests or carves out a business line to be a separate company, this new company (or ‘newco’) loses all the back-office services that it used to get from the large parent company. Rather than rebuild a large back-office for the much smaller carve-out, they can sign up to our service and get a ‘back-office in a box’. We can normally save our clients 40% in cost through our service.
What types of companies do you work with and how does ContinuServe work specifically with PE firms?
Our focus is on mid-market companies (anything from $50 million to $5 billion) in revenue. We work across a variety of industries including manufacturing, restaurant/retail, and logistics/distribution.
Many of the mid-market companies we work with are owned by PE firms. We have a close relationship with a number of PE firms helping them optimize the back-office operations of their portfolio companies.
We also have a number of partnerships that are being finalized that we will be able to share soon.
Amazon and ContinuServe recently announced cloud services focused on private equity firms. Could you tell us more about this and how it works?
When a PE firm buys a carve-out, time is of the essence. There is a need to quickly get the newco up and running with its own back-office. If they don’t do it quickly, there are a lot of financial penalties. We’re establishing key partnerships to help us rapidly implement our solutions and help our clients during the carve-out. Our partnership with AWS helps in this regard because AWS and ContinuServe are developing tools and procedures to quickly get the AWS technology infrastructure set up for the new carve-out.
What do expect to see happen with carve-outs in 2021?
I think they may increase after the election results are finalized. The coronavirus has also created a situation where larger companies need to focus on their core business and will divest non-core businesses. Also, once the coronavirus lightens up and travel increases, that will facilitate the closing of carve-out deals.
For more information, visit the website: https://continuserve.com/
