Mowery & Schoenfeld

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was managing director of a private equity fund.

What challenge were you trying to address with Mowery & Schoenfeld?

We needed help with our end-of-the-year accounting, as well as with other accounting services when we were doing due diligence on companies that we wanted to purchase.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Mowery & Schoenfeld helped us prepare our private equity firm’s end-of-the-year taxes and put together our investments’ Schedule K-1s. Then, they helped us with accounting services, looking at the books of the companies that we wanted to acquire.

They did a lot of financial analyses to help us put everything together and verify the information that we were seeing. Additionally, they provided us specifically with quality of earnings reports, which reported on the quality of what we were seeing in other companies’ books and whether we could trust the accounting that they were doing or not.

For our taxes, we basically provided them our information, documents, and account table. We were using another company for our quarterly filings and other accounting services during the year. This other company also handled our payroll services, but Mowery & Schoenfeld handled our overall taxes and due diligence needs.

What is the team composition?

We had one point of contact.

How did you come to work with Mowery & Schoenfeld?

They came highly recommended by people that we trusted, so we didn’t interview many other people.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested about $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in January 2018, and we finished working with them in January 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We ran a very specific type of fund, which was a search fund. Mowery & Schoenfeld had helped many search funds, so they understood our investors’ community, how to file our taxes, and what to look for when acquiring certain types of deals in our space.

How did Mowery & Schoenfeld perform from a project management standpoint?

For the most part, we communicated via email. We also set up a data room within a secure server to communicate sensitive information, and we had phone calls whenever necessary.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Mowery & Schoenfeld’s accounting skills were very strong, which made them work quickly. Additionally, they always answered our questions when we had them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Whenever we needed quality of earnings reports, Mowery & Schoenfeld’s responsiveness depended on the time of the year. As they were a large firm, they worked with other larger companies that became their main priority. I felt that some things could have been delivered faster. However, they always hit the deadline.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I recommend Mowery & Schoenfeld to companies in the same type of fund that we were. Talk to them early to know the paperwork that you need to provide once you engage with them.