Mizzau & Partners

Business Cases

Strategic decisions in real business situations

The decisions that shape the value of a business rarely have a standard answer.

Mizzau & Partners' Business Cases examine situations representative of the choices facing founders, shareholders, management teams and investors: accelerate or consolidate, debt or equity, whether to open the capital, whether to acquire, which industrial or financial partner to choose, whether to fix performance before a transaction.

Each case starts from the industrial context, isolates the decision to be taken, sets the alternatives side by side and makes the principal trade-offs explicit.

Note

Where necessary, cases are anonymised or composite to protect counterparty confidentiality, and are presented for illustrative purposes.

Case index

Six decisions, one method

Cases are organised by decision, not by sector. The question is always the title.

  1. Industrial Growth · Private Capital

    Should an industrial company self-fund growth or open its capital?

    An international industrial business must choose between self-funded growth, private equity and a strategic partnership.

  2. Capital Readiness · Capital Structure

    Debt or equity: which capital structure best supports growth?

    A company with a substantial development plan must decide which capital structure fits its debt-service capacity, control objectives, risk tolerance and industrial priorities.

  3. M&A · Industrial Growth

    Acquire a competitor or continue growing organically?

    A business weighs whether to accelerate scale, capabilities and geographic reach through an acquisition, or to stay on an organic growth path.

  4. Buy-and-Build · Private Capital

    When does a buy-and-build strategy actually create value?

    A supply of targets is not enough: the industrial rationale, integration capacity, financing structure and value creation logic all have to hold.

  5. Strategic Partnerships · Private Capital

    Industrial partner or private equity?

    A shareholder compares two routes that can both accelerate growth, but with very different consequences for ownership, governance, market position and execution.

  6. Value Creation · Investment Readiness

    Improve performance before opening the capital?

    A company is considering a capital transaction but must first judge whether to address margins, organisation, governance and the quality of its growth.

How each case is built

From the situation to the questions that remain open

Every Business Case follows a common method, adapted to the decision at hand, designed to make the alternatives comparable before any of them is chosen. There is no results section: the aim is to show how the decision is framed, not to document an outcome.

  1. 01

    The situation

    The industrial context and where the company stands.

  2. 02

    The decision

    The choice to be made and the variables it touches.

  3. 03

    The options

    The routes realistically available, with their merits and constraints.

  4. 04

    The trade-offs

    A qualitative comparison, without scores or rankings.

  5. 05

    Our perspective

    The order in which, in our view, the decision should be worked through.

  6. 06

    The questions

    What the board or shareholder must resolve before moving forward.

Where Business Cases sit

Strategic Questions

What should a decision-maker understand?

Business Cases

How is a complex decision structured?

Track Record

What situations have we worked on?

Capabilities

How can the decision be supported?