Introduction

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are. My name is Tim Goddard, SVP of marketing here at Corum. Welcome to our Q1 2017 M&A update. We'll be looking back at the whole quarter, so we're going to get right to that, but we have a few things to talk about first. Number one, we have a couple of field reports from deals Corum has just wrapped up. Also a special report on some changing strategies that we are seeing in PE from our CEO Bruce Milne, that you'll definitely want to hear. Then we'll launch our research report with details on valuation metrics, deals, and other trends in all six market sectors.

 

Field Report: Netgain acquired by Bluff Point Associates

 

Let's jump right into it and start with Rob Schram here at our headquarters.

 

Rob Schram

 

We are pleased to announce the acquisition of Corum client Netgain by Westport, CT-based PE firm Bluff Point Associates. Netgain is a provider of IT as a service to healthcare providers and mid-market companies in highly-regulated industries.

 

The company represents a platform investment upon which Bluff Point can apply its expertise in the healthcare information services sector to further accelerate growth via additional bolt-on investments. Netgain's founders will remain with the company as part of the deal, working in concert with the Bluff Point team.

 

Corum sees this pattern as increasingly common, that is, growth-stage investors applying a bench of executive talent with focused industry expertise, along with deep pockets in order to enable rapid market expansion.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Thank you, Rob.

 

Field Report: Assistance Software acquired by Unit 4

 

Now let's head across the Atlantic to hear from Jon Scott, managing director of Corum Group International, with another deal.

 

Jon Scott

 

We're pleased to announce the acquisition of Corum client, Netherlands-based Assistance Software by Unit 4, also a Netherlands-based ERP SaaS company owned by the US-based PE firm Advent International. This continues the theme of PE firms backing their portfolios in these acquisitions.

 

Assistance Software is one of the most widely-used professional services automation suites internationally. Professional services firms are under intense pressure to increase their efficiencies and services, and research has continually shown that those using software developed especially for the services segment are consistently more profitable. This acquisition expands Unit 4's already comprehensive solution for professional services organizations and a new Unit 4 PSA suite adds an industry-leading front end, with the added advantage of seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. This supports Unit 4's strategy to deliver specialized customer-facing solutions to service organizations, so they can continually improve the management of their operations from front to back office.

 

Congratulations to the Assistance Software team.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Thank you, Jon.

 

Special Report: Private Equity Strategies

 

Now I'd like to turn things over to Bruce Milne, our CEO. Related to what we just heard, we're seeing some new strategies in the PE buyer community. Bruce?

 

Bruce Milne

 

Because of a record number of cash offers we received in the first quarter, I recently surveyed our clients and asked the question, "Were there any surprises in the process?" To a man I got the response they were surprised that often the most aggressive bidders were not from the strategic buyers, but from portfolio companies of private equity firms. These included sellers in not only North America, Europe and Asia, but Latin America and down under. So this is clearly a global phenomenon.

Corum Group has done billions of dollars of transactions with private equity firms—deals like those Rob and Jon just described. So this trend is not new. What's different now is the role played by the private equity firm – who does the work in the acquisition process and the volume of transactions.

The PE firms -- these financial buyers -- are behaving like strategics, with active involvement in even the smallest transaction. PE firms globally are sitting on almost $3 trillion in cash and they're deploying these funds to buy portfolio companies -- for example the deal we just saw with Netgain in the Midwest, bought by Bluff Point. Then, they doing "tuck in" or "bolt on" deals for these platform portfolio companies - such as Assistance in Europe where the funding was sourced from Advent International.

 

They are buying for many reasons - including technology, domain expertise, geographic coverage, user base, and distribution and so much more.

This trend is happening in every market and every region as shown some of these tombstones involving TA associates, Marlin Equity, Bregal Sagemont, and BC partners -- after 31 years we've worked with all of them.

In the past, the platform companies did most of the work with the PEs playing the more passive role of “financial backer,” but today, for many firms, the roles have changed. In many cases the work has shifted where the PE firms are staffing up to do acquisitions, from identification to due diligence, to final negotiation. Often the offers are even jointly signed by the platform company as well as the PE firm.

 

In one recent offer we received for a client, the private equity firm involved told me they had 30 people doing nothing but acquisitions, assisting their 8 different portfolio companies.

In addition to this trend of shifted resources, we are often seeing the private equity firm bring in seasoned CEOs with the experience to take the platform company public.

Often the funds that are working with are smaller sub-funds of a much larger Private Equity fund, such as we saw with Vista Equity, who headlined our recent PE panel in February. They are very sophisticated buyers and have done over 80 transactions the past two years - the most in the world.

Most of the offers are for cash though there's some structure deals, particularly with very small companies. Since the funds have developed a very tight professional process they're able to execute much faster than most strategic firms, who they are often outbidding.

So, for those of you looking to sell don't look just to the Strategic Buyers, who are still doing most of the biggest deals. Don't forget the PE firms. While you may not know some of these private equity firms, and you may think you're too small for them, there's a good chance you will fit into one of their portfolio companies.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Thank you, Bruce.

 

2017 Q1 Research Report - New Buyers and Valuations

 

For more on this topic, and much more, we're going to look back at the entirety of the first quarter of the year with our research team. So now over to Elon, Amber, Yasmin, Amanda and Thomas.

 

Elon Gasper

 

Thanks, Tim. We begin with the public markets, which held most of their gains through March for a spectacular Q1 and early April, led by tech-heavy indices and many of their largest companies, in a broad advance that just kept shrugging off risks from politics to rising interest rates, leaving the long bull market apparently still standing, with a chance to run another leg up again in Q2, taking it into its ninth year.

 

One effect on tech M&A of this lengthy boom shows in our Corum Index, which booked a drop in total transaction volume, reflecting a supply squeeze our analysis shows also stems from upstream factors like the so-called “Series A Crunch” in venture capital -- basically, there are fewer companies for sale because so many have been bought while the VCs flinched on funding more. So buyers -- including the PEs, whose expanded bolt-on buying, that Bruce mentioned, helped them set a deal flow record for this cycle -- must look further afield, as the continued rise in cross-border transactions shows.

 

To view that PE phenomenon from another angle we can look back and compare the top PE’s bolt-on buying ratio from last year with this last quarter: It’s not only continuing, but actually rose a bit, with bolt-on acquisitions now outnumbering platforms 2 to 1 - and with none of the top PE buyers buying more than 2 platforms apiece. So a lot of good news for sellers, and one more reason you should be testing the M&A market this year if you’re not prepared to weather its next downturn.

 

Now let’s view our 30 sectors, divided into 6 markets, starting with Horizontal. Amber?

 

Horizontal Software Market Valuations

 

Amber Stoner

 

Horizontal sales multiples remained steady while EBITDA multiples bounced back from a dip in February. Sales multiples increased in the BI, Marketing & AdTech, and ERP subsectors which also recorded high deal volume in Q1.

 

In Marketing and AdTech, AdTheorent was bought by H.I.G. Capital to lead its first platform acquisition in 2017. AdTheorent delivers mapping solutions to connect advertisers with their target audiences, an example of the emerging predictive advertising trend.

 

CalReply, a calendar marketing SaaS developer out of New York, was acquired by Australia’s marketing automation SaaS company Rokt to help it establish new customer engagement communication channels.

 

Webtrends sold its Infinity big data platform to Oracle, which plans to make the Portland-based analytics pioneer a part of Oracle Marketing Cloud in an attempt to beat Google Analytics at managing customers’ behavior.

 

Data aggregator for digital publishers Ad-Juster was landed by China’s Innotech Capitals as part of a strategy to roll-up multiple adtech companies to create a larger adtech ecosystem. In addition, it’s the first US deal for the Shanghai investment group.

 

The HR space was active in Q1. Employee custom training software developer Navis Learning was picked up by compliance solutions provider BLR, a portfolio company of Leeds Equity Partners. And HR management SaaS provider Fairsail was bought by its minority shareholder Sage to better serve mid-sized businesses on the global scale, where rivals SuccessFactors and Workday have firmly established themselves.

 

In the collaboration space, LeChat, the company behind the Sameroom cross-team messaging platform, was purchased by cloud communications firm 8x8, in its first deal in nearly two years to tap into the highly fragmented mobile team collaboration market.

 

Do.com, which delivers tools for making meetings more productive, was acquired by Amazon Web Services to roll the acquired product into its recently launched Chime communications suite, a potential threat to rivals Google and Microsoft in the productivity tools market.

 

Content management attracted strategic buyers, making efforts to strengthen their footprints in this domain and fill the gaps in their solutions. In the UK, PleaseTech, which develops software for collaborative document review and co-authoring, was sold to Ideagen for over $12M, a 2.6x sales multiple.

 

Ottawa-based DocOrigin, known for its business forms generation and labelling software, was picked up by Eclipse Corporation, its peer at the forefront of the e-forms revolution. And RecordLion, a records management SaaS provider out of Texas, was snapped up by Gimmal to extend its offering to the application of policy outside SharePoint and Office 365.

 

In its second deal of the quarter, Sage reached into the BI space when it bought San Francisco’s Compass, which provides e-commerce analytics reporting SaaS solutions.

 

MarketSpace, a competitive data visualization platform, was picked up by marketing and enterprise metrics SaaS provider Tickr in an attempt to improve its real time tracking capabilities for top brands and agencies while boosting its customer base by 500%.

 

Finally in the ERP space, Italy’s Tagetik, a maker of accounting and performance management solutions, was acquired by Wolters Kluwer for nearly $320M, more than 5x revenue.

 

Now to the Сonsumer sector, Thomas?

 

Consumer Software Market Valuations

 

Thomas Wright

 

The Consumer sector set multi-year highs for both Sales and EBITDA multiples due to the improving health of the gaming market and the emergence of machine learning and predictive technologies as ways to unlock consumer preferences and improve user experience - Corum’s Top Ten Technology Trend of Data Science Monetization.

 

For example, the content recommendation engine Rover was bought by native ad network Revcontent for its 40M users and its machine-learning derived customer insights.

 

Spotify also attempted to deepen its expertise in content discovery and recommendation through inorganic growth. First, the music streaming company picked up London-based Sonalytic for its machine-learning based audio detection algorithms, copyright monitoring and music discovery platform. Next in late March, Spotify purchased MightyTV, a New York-based startup that applies artificial intelligence and Tinder-like swipes to discover video content.

 

Search engine companies looked externally to stay on the cutting edge, with Chinese giant Baidu landing Raven Tech, China’s answer to Alexa, to further its push into smart home technology and AI-enabled speech recognition - and this morning Baidu bought another AI firm, vision specialist xPerception out of Silicon Valley.

 

Animated graphics search engine Giphy acquired Builds for its custom emoji applications to enrich its visual cue search capabilities.

 

Gaming continued to drive a majority of the activity in the sector with deals including Bulgarian video game studio Crytek Black Sea being snapped up by SEGA and rebranded as Creative Assembly Sofia. Black sea studios was originally purchased by Crytek on the heels of its highly successful historical real-time strategy game, Knights of Honor. Due to Crytek’s current restructuring, it is selling its most marketable assets - with Black Sea studios proving an appealing target to SEGA. With Eastern Europe emerging as a hub of high performance gaming studios, Corum expects the region to be a hotbed of acquisition activity moving forward.

 

Ubisoft made strides in the casual gaming space by buying FreeStyleGames for its collaborative online, music-based video games and highly experience development team. A month later, the gaming giant inked a deal with Growtopia, a free-to-play social game where players have the ability to create and share gameplay environments, continuing Ubisoft’s commitment to increasing player freedom and more importantly, long-term player engagement.

 

Lastly, the Brooklyn-based VR startup Sprawly was acquired by Digital Domain, a Chinese holding company for video game and digital content development studios. The deal continues Digital’s aggressive M&A strategy, following up on its purchase of Digital Funk Machine a year ago - yet another example of aggressive Chinese buyers looking Westward for technology acquisitions.

 

How’s the internet sector looking Amanda?

 

Internet Software Market Valuations

 

Amanda Tallman

 

Fluctuating valuations in the Internet sector have been recovering after a dip in December… with sales and EBITDA multiples up particularly in the Travel & Leisure space where deal activity remained high.

 

Airbnb picked up Canadian upscale property rental site, Luxury Retreats for a reported $300 million, in its biggest acquisition yet, beating out rival bidders, Expedia and Accor. The addition of high-end homes and concierge service is another step towards Airbnb becoming a full service global travel company.

 

Travel operator TUI sold Travelopia, a UK-based network of specialized travel brands, to KKR for over $404M. For TUI, the sale helps them become more vertically integrated, sharpening focus on their hotel and cruise businesses, while Travelopia and KKR can benefit from geographical expansion and the potential of the growing adventure travel market.

 

Booking optimization provider InternetHotels and its sister service Hotelsatanywhere were nabbed by HotelPlanner, to add individual room booking abilities to its core group booking expertise. Florida-based Tourico Holidays was picked up by Cinven-backed Hotelbeds Group to reinforce its B2B Bedbank unit in North America.

 

Elsewhere in travel, Denmark’s Momondo was acquired by Priceline for $550M to bolster Kayak in the Nordics.

 

In the e-commerce space, Amazon made waves by paying over $790M for Middle Eastern online retail platform Souq. The deal value was nearly equivalent to the amount Amazon paid for all of its acquisitions in the past two years combined. This large sum may be in response to Walmart’s success with Jet.com which made two acquisitions, picking up online footwear retailer Shoebuy.com for $70 million and clothing retailer ModCloth for more than $50 million.

 

The ticketing sector saw deals all over the world. Dutch online ticketing specialist Ticketscript was picked up by Eventbrite to supercharge its market share in Europe, close behind only Ticketmaster and CTS Eventim.

 

In China, online ticketing platform Damai was purchased by Alibaba to help the retail giant succeed in its media and entertainment strategy.

 

Finally, in India, Bookmyshow, a ticketing subsidiary of Bigtree Entertainment, strengthened its regional capabilities in events and movies with two deals in a row: Townscript and MastiTickets.

 

In the social networking space, MeetMe acquired San Francisco based If(we) for $60million adding to its portfolio social networking sites Tagged and hi5, as well as social software and mobile development services.

 

And in France, former high-flyer Viadeo, was bought out by the top French newspaper Le Figaro for $1.6 million, as an addition to their Classifieds segment. The lesson here is that in the winner-take-all internet sector, sell when the moment’s right.

 

Yasmin?

 

Vertical Software Market Valuations

 

Yasmin Khodamoradi

 

Vertical sales multiples have climbed since the dip in October, with EBITDA metrics at 12 month highs, lead primarily by healthcare with automotive and A/E/C also up.

 

M&A for autonomous vehicle technology has continued, driving the largest deal of the year by far, Intel’s $15B purchase of Israeli self-driving sensor company Mobileye, which should help them respond to competitive pressure in the auto market from rival chip-makers Nvidia and Qualcomm, and establish a firm foothold in the nexus of the connected car movement.

 

Automakers haven’t idled either, as Ford acquired robotics and artificial intelligence startup Argo AI through a five year billion dollar investment, getting Ford one step closer to rolling out fully autonomous vehicles. And In Germany, Gestigon was picked up by French connected car component maker Valeo for its body and gesture recognition tech in vehicles.

 

In Financial Services, French portfolio BI firm BISAM was bought by FactSet for $205M at over 7x sales to strengthen its risk analytics and client reporting offerings. Rage Frameworks, which offers AI-enabled data analytics SaaS for wealth management, was bought by BPO provider Genpact, which hopes to capitalize on the wave of automation poised to affect traditional services models.

 

And our top PE acquirer, Vista Equity, paid over 2 billion at nearly three times revenue to take Canadian fintech specialist D + H private, merging them with UK-based banking software provider Misys, with the goal of building a diversified fintech powerhouse.

 

Moving on to Real Estate, Dallas-based apartment data provider Axiometrics was bought by RealPage for $75M at over 5x revenue in a bid to become the definitive source for apartment data and analytics. Real estate classifieds site Housing.com was pocketed by Elara, owner of Indian real estate listing sites PropTiger and Makaan. In the UK, ZPG bolstered its data assets with property data provider Hometrack, and last month acquired property management SaaS provider Expert Agent.

 

In Healthcare, buyers were still hungry for innovative tech in patient engagement. Eliza, which provides data-driven patient outreach, was acquired by HMS for $170M to enhance its patient engagement portfolio. Finally, Phoenix-based PracticeMojo, which enables HIPPA-compliant communication for dental practices, was bought by Riverside, as a bolt-on to its search-engine marketing platform ProSites.

 

How did IT services do last quarter?

 

IT Services Software Market Valuations

 

Thomas Wright

 

Sales multiples in Developed markets have continue their year long climb, after a brief dip in February, while EBITDA multiples maintained the high levels of the past eight months.

Emerging markets have corrected after a 6-month slide, with both sales & EBITDA multiples trending upwards.

 

Private market deals have been driven by a record amount of low-interest cash available to PEs, the large organizations looking to buy rather than build and our Top Ten Trend Focused IT Services trend.

 

In an early megadeal, Document-outsourcing service Novitex and Electronic Data Interchange provider SourceHOV were merged into Exela Technologies to deliver tech-enabled information services. With services deeply embedded in more than 60 percent of the Fortune 100, the combined company will be a core partner for the world’s largest financial organizations, insurance payers, healthcare providers and commercial enterprises. The deal totals $2.8B or 1.9x sales – considerably higher than the industry average -- which exemplifies the Focused IT trend,  where buyers are willing to pay increased multiples for firms that are focused on particular platforms and problem sets.

 

Several other deals focused on the Autodesk ecosystem, with Quebec-based IRISCO’s Autodesk services unit was purchased by solidCAD, adding a service division to the software subsidiary of survey hardware retailer Cansel. And Northwest-based PacifiCAD was bought by Canada’s iMAGINiT to deepen its expertise in Autodesk systems integration and consulting.

 

Another IT service focus – localization -- is in high demand across many, diverse subsectors, with Germany-based Lucy picked up by United Language for its SAP localization services.

Paris-based video game localizer Exequo bought by Lionbridge to remove the friction of launching new games to multiple markets.

 

And life sciences language services provider LUZ was acquired by UK-based RWS for over $82M to complement its IP support services.

 

Cloud migration continued to draw in deals with Google picking up AppBridge, a data migration startup, to streamline Google Drive improvements for enterprise users.

 

Finally, DC-based cloud services provider Day1 Solutions was bought by Deloitte to boost its cloud managed services - another focus seeing considerable demand in the M&A market.

 

Infrastructure Software Market Valuations

 

Amber Stoner

 

Sales and EBITDA multiples in the Infrastructure space reached 12 month highs, with valuations rising across nearly all subsectors. Security and Endpoint retained healthy sales metrics along with increased EBITDA multiples, as we saw both private equity and strategics emptying their pockets in bids for new tech.

 

Machine learning was in demand in the security space with deal valuations hitting more than 20x revenue. For instance, behavior-based profiling SaaS provider LightCyber was wrapped up by Palo Alto for $105M to reinforce its automated threat prevention capabilities. And HPE, which made 4 acquisitions in Q1, spent $55M to get behavior analytics firm Niara, to build on HPE’s ClearPass network security portfolio.

 

Northrop Grumman’s threat detection division BluVector was sold to LLR Partners for $50M. Malware protection company Invincea was snapped up by Sophos for $100M to utilize Invincea’s patented deep learning tech as an access point to the US threat detection market.

 

Agile 3, which develops a dashboard to visualize and manage risks associated with protecting sensitive data, was picked up by IBM to strengthen its Guardium data security and protection platform, in its first deal of the year.

 

Vertical and horizontal sectors both showed an interest in identity management solutions. Pip Learning, which provides a single sign-on platform to protect student privacy, was picked up by Authentica Solutions to complement its K-12 offering. And Dutch online identity authentication SaaS company Digidentity was acquired as a bolt-on by Vista Equity portfolio company Solera to enhance its personal identity management division.

 

In the Internet of Things space, Zentri, specializing in low-power WiFi tech for the deployment of connected devices, was bought by Austin-based chipmaker Silicon Labs to extend its multiprotocol connectivity portfolio.

 

DataRPM, which develops machine-learning predictive analytics solutions for industrial IoT connected device management, was snapped up by Progress for $30M to bolster its cognitive apps platform.

 

In the app development space, mobile app testing specialist SOASTA was acquired by Akamai for $200M, more than 6x revenue, to broaden its portfolio beyond CDN services. Enterprise software testing and QA solutions provider Tricentis was bought by Insight Venture Partners, in its first platform acquisition of the year, for $165M, at 4.7x revenue.

 

And Ixia and its network app performance testing systems were acquired by Keysight Technologies for $1.6B, more than 3x revenue to continue its move into the software testing space started by its 2015 acquisition of Anite.

 

Finally, BlueCat Networks, a developer of DNS and BYOD management SaaS solutions, was bought by Madison Dearborn, a more traditional, generalist PE that still spent $325M, more than 5x revenue.

 

Elon Gasper

 

But there always seems to be one more in Infrastructure: yesterday, Dell subsidiary VMWare bought Wavefront, an early stage Silicon Valley Infrastructure Management SaaS company that raised $52 million just 6 months ago, as the sector tries to cope with new forms of application deployment, driving M&A demand as the waves of change keep crashing down on it -- but that’s more good news for sellers, right, Tim?

 

Timothy Goddard

 

It is. Hopefully we'll have some more good news to share in the months ahead. Bruce mentioned that we are a record pace here at Corum and looking forward to a lot more announcements coming in the future.

 

Q&A

 

Now we'd like to turn to Q&A, and we do have a few minutes, so if you have questions, please send them in.

 

One that just came in that I think is relevant, we just talked about the five-side squeeze here, is that raising multiples, Elon?

 

Elon Gasper

 

Absolutely. It's raising multiples as well as bringing a different range of potential sellers experiencing those as they go into the market. It's just supply and demand.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Makes sense. On the demand side, I have another question that came in. “What does dry powder look like for PEs and strategics?” Elon.

 

Elon Gasper

 

The quick answer is trillions of dollars. It is at historic highs. The strategics, easily the top set of strategic buyers, have a trillion dollars in hand. If you move beyond that to the mid tier of strategics and the private companies that aren't disclosing how much they have got, you could round up at least another half-trillion, or as much as another trillion there in the strategics. The PE side we think even over-balances that. Again, those are not companies that are going to make full disclosure of how much they have in hand and how much is commitment from investors, and how much is not disclosed, but easily there are $4 trillion sitting out there. That is historically unprecedented for there to be that much dry powder on the demand side.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Then coming in with the supply squeezers, it is differently interesting times.

 

Elon Gasper

 

It is a perfect storm.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Another question just came in about a specific market, asking about whether or not MarTech and AdTech have slowed down.

 

Number one, I think you have to separate those. There is a lot happening in marketing and marketing automation, verticalized marketing solutions, that is very separate from the AdTech world, which has struggled. The deal flow has seemed to remain constant. Amber, you work with that quite a bit, how do you respond to that?

 

Amber Stoner

 

I think the deal activity hasn't gone down, clearly. Now whether we're seeing the multiples there that we want to see is another question. As you said, the marketing automation, anybody in there is probably going to see higher valuations than the AdTech.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

That's one of the things that we've noticed, a lot of folks out there conflating MarTech and AdTech, which I think is a mistake to make these days. There are a few folks that have figured out AdTech and they have really nailed it. Everyone is is really having a hard time. So those who have solutions that provide that immediate ROI that AdTech can really get those numbers quickly, unlike a lot of other tooks, that is in demand. Everything else is starting to come along to monetization. Does that line up with the way you see it?

 

Elon Gasper

 

Yes, and the AdTech situation is subject to change at a moment's notice if there are breakthroughs in how to do data monetization. That's one of our Top Ten Trends and I think it overlaps with the AdTech space in that that's what AdTech is trying to do. Now, 4-5 years ago, there were lots of possibilities for new technology, especially as the mobile resolution happened, as the cycles changed and the new platform became global. The people that solved the mobile advertising challenge experienced tremendous rewards. I think to declare AdTech even somnolent, let alone dead, is erroneous, since we're just waiting to see what the next new thing is, and if you've got it, then you will see demand for what you've got. If you've got a clone of what's been done before, or you've got a slight incremental improvement in speed or cost or efficiency of both combined, that's just not going to be as in style in the AdTech space because it's going to take something more revolutionary to drive deals there.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Makes sense. We have a lot of good questions. There's one more I want to get to, it's a good one, and the rest we will have to followup with by email. I want to toss this to Jeff Riley, one of our deal makers. The question says, “We're a growing company that is working to becoming a cloud managed services provider. We anticipate maturing in 2-3 years. Is there any guidance we could use from you to make the right choices in these years to interest a potential buyer?”

 

Jeff Riley

 

Preparation is key for entering an M&A cycle and it is never too soon to start. I look at buying a house to be a good analogy. When you're buying a house, you look at what the resale value is going to be, and if there isn't a solid line towards high valuation for your business or in the resale of a house, you look for ways to improve that. One of the simplest ways you can do that with your business is to work on your recurring revenue cycles and your key customer acquisition cost metrics and your retention rates. Looking at being prepared also means having your act together with regards to how you run and manage the business. That will be a key thing that any buyer will look for as they review your business as an opportunity for acquisition.

 

Timothy Goddard

 

Thanks, Jeff. If you want to learn more about this, please do come to one of our live events coming up around the globe. Hopefully we'll see you there. With that, we'll go to our close.