Intangible Matters Series

Understanding how intangible assets can be the weather forecast for your business.

The speed of innovation in agritech has never been faster – in fact, in many instances, Covid has expedited the innovation cycle and speed to market.

However, a challenge for many companies is how you scale quickly, while at the same time making sure you have the right measures in place to protect your business and the intangible assets (such as data, brand, confidential information, systems and processes, customer and supplier relationships, software, code, patents, and trademarks) you create that underpin your competitive edge.

This challenge is one that Gill Burke, Co-Founder and Director of Beta A2, a nutrition company making products from real Australian A2 protein milk, faced when she began scaling up to export globally. Corporate espionage, cyber-attacks, threatened litigation – Beta A2’s journey was littered with challenges, which sadly are not that uncommon.

In this session hear from Gill about her scale-up journey, and from Michael Masterson, Managing Director at global intangible asset advisory, valuation, and transaction firm EverEdge, about how to innovate and scale at speed, while also ensuring you mitigate the key risks you're likely to face on your journey, including:

• What are intangible assets and why are they so critical
• How intangible assets drive your competitive edge
• What are the key intangible asset risks companies face and how to mitigate them.

The insider’s guide to maximising yield and higher valuations.

A pitfall many companies fall into when establishing a valuation is coming up with an arbitrary number (“we are raising $10M and I don’t want to give away more than 33% so we are worth $30M”) or based on the hope that an investor will accept the company’s financial projections (which tend to be highly speculative in early-stage companies).

Both these approaches ignore the critical impact intangible assets (such as data, brand, confidential information, systems and processes, customer and supplier relationships, software, code, patents, and trademarks) have on a company’s value that can be orders of magnitude greater than factors such as historical cost of development or forecast cashflows.

So how do you ensure that your valuation captures the true value of your company and that you aren’t leaving money on the table or giving away too much equity?

Hear from Ernesto Fernandez, General Manager and Chief Intangible Asset Officer at Rhino-Rack, a leading manufacturer and distributor of highly engineered automotive roof racks and roof-top accessories, about his experience in building value through intangible assets and how the company achieved its AU$255m sale to Clarus Corporation.

Joining Ernesto will be Tyler Capson, Managing Director at global intangible asset advisory, valuation and transaction firm EverEdge, who will share insights, case studies and practical advice about how to achieve a robust, reliable, and defensible valuation that captures the value of all your assets, including:

• Why conventional valuation methods won’t capture your true value
• How to leverage your intangible assets to achieve a higher valuation
• Five key tips on articulating company values when working towards an exit or capital event.

As the saying goes “if you build it, they will come”. However, in the agritech sector, where value is often driven through innovative intangible assets, deployment is not necessarily the strategy that will create the highest return on investment.

Instead, higher margin returns are increasingly owned by those who license or sell intangible assets, either instead of, or in addition to, solely deploying their technology, product, or service.

In this session, we’ll hear from Sarah Cross, Head of IP Strategy at multi-national, dairy cooperative Fonterra about how the company manages its intangible assets to maximise value throughout the commercialisation process.

Sarah will be joined by Michael Masterson, Managing Director at global intangible asset advisory, valuation and transaction firm EverEdge, who will share insights, case studies and practical advice on how to make money from your intangible assets including how to:

• Determine what commercialisation strategy is right for your business
• Unlock value through licensing agreements
• Mitigate the risk of your IP being stolen as you look to expand.

When it comes to exporting, success or failure often comes down to two things. First, whether you can create an ‘unfair advantage’ or ‘competitive edge’ for your product or service that will transfer across markets; and secondly, how well you’ve done your due diligence (or pre-departure checks) on the markets you are moving into before you hit go on your strategy.

In this session we’ll hear from Calvin Stead, CEO at Kelly Engineering, about his companies export journey and how it has built and protected its competitive edge as it has scaled internationally.

Calvin will be joined by Michael Masterson, Managing Director at global intangible asset advisory, valuation, and transaction firm EverEdge, who will share insights, case studies and practical advice about how you can build an unfair advantage around your product or service and scale it in a way that translates into increased sales and/or margin, including:

• How to build an ‘unfair advantage’ for your product or service
• The ‘pre-departure checklist’ to ensure exporting success
• How to protect your assets when exporting globally
• How to avoid IP infringements when preparing to export.