Acquisition Unlock: €210m in 5 Years

I ultimately said to him, why don't you just leave Deloitte and come and join us as CFO and help me pull all this together. Oh, wow. And in fairness to him, he decided to take the risk and jump ship. And so, so Shane left.

Lloyd joined us as cfo. He was very well connected because he was a corporate finance guy or an investment banker I suppose, as, as you guys would say. And he, he basically helped us to, to, to raise the, the money and to buy those two businesses in 2021.

Many people listening, part of the reason they're listening is to learn how to buy a business because, because they don't know. And it's a skill set unto itself. Yeah. Is there anything, any takeaway, any distillation.

Of those two years that you can share with the audience about, you know, coming at this from a cold start, coming at figuring out how to buy business from a cold start. Maybe, maybe the takeaway is hire a guy who knows how. Well, find your shame.

Well, it's funny like, because even before I had the confidence to go and approach an EY or a Deloitte, like, I knew nothing. My, my knowledge of finance was, I could reconcile the bank on zero. I probably wasn't very good at that either because I always lost the receipts.

Right. So like, that was the extent of my finance acumen. So I, I go to Google and I type in how to buy a business, right? And it. Or how to value a business.

Because I had approached our partner at this stage and they said, make me an offer. So I'm thinking, how much do I offer? Like, how do I go about this?

Google said businesses are, let's say in our space, valued on a multiple of ebitda. I'd never heard of ebitda. What does EBITDA mean?

I didn't understand the answer. Right. I was so rudimentary in my knowledge. So what I did, actually I, I went and I hired a, what we call grinds.

It's like a, like a tutor that would give you help college kids pass their exams. And I reached out to a number of them and I said, look, I need a crash course here in the basics and in finance. And I need you to explain EBITDA to me and I need you to explain why that's important.

And most of them told me to take a hike and that's not it, not at all what they do. But one guy from the Philippines decided he'd, he'd take me on. So I spent two hours with him and he gave me enough information to be dangerous.