Snow Phipps Group acquired Efficient Collaborate Retail Marketing Co., a firm that sets up meetings between consumer products manufacturers and retailers, from BV Investment Partners.

Snow Phipps, a New York middle-market private equity firm with $1.7 billion invested since its start in 2005, focuses on industrials, services and consumer sectors. Efficient Collaborate Retail Marketing, also known as ECRM, is based in Solon, Ohio. The company sets up meetings—labeled “Efficient Program Planning Sessions”—between potential wholesale buyers and sellers in health and beauty care, general merchandise, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, electronics and categories of consumer products. The company also uses proprietary software to streamline the interactions.

BV Investment Partners, a Boston-based middle-market private equity firm, focuses on information and business services and communications sectors. The firm acquired a majority stake in ECRM in 2013. According to a source familiar with the deal, BV is making nearly nine times return on its original investment in ECRM and a 185 percent internal rate of return. Since 1983, BV Investment has invested more than $2.7 billion in 84 companies.

Both the buyer and seller have had other deals in June. Snow Phipps, through a portfolio company called Teasdale Foods Inc., acquired Mesa Foods from Encore Consumer Capital as a part of the firm’s strategy to build a Hispanic foods business . BV purchased a majority stake in C.F. Stinson, designer and marketer of textiles for commercial interiors.

Robert W. Baird & Co. was ECRM’s financial adviser on the transaction, and Choate Hall and Stewart was legal counsel for ECRM and BV Investment.

Business services Restructuring