Acquisition Unlock: €210m in 5 Years

But just to spoiler your, the trajectory of your growth here is you're always buying bigger businesses. Yeah. From a minnow to a fish to a whale sort of story here, everybody. It's incredible. Anything to say on that theme?

Or maybe, maybe as you were, as you were undertaking it the first time because I guess kind of completing this first transaction, which the audience can tell that you do, probably gives you confidence that going from buying a bigger business as a smaller business isn't crazy because you were successful at your first attempt at doing so. Anything to say on that theme?

So I suppose we just, we, we acquired what we seen in front of us, what we thought made sense. You know, Absolutely. I can see why that's the common approach.

But for us it was more of a. There was no strategy behind us. This was the printing partner that we had.

That's. Yeah. This was the problem we were trying to solve. And then because of that first experience of buying a business that was, you know, multiple societies that we were and we did that and it succeeded. The next time we look for an acquisition, you know, you just kind of want to look for a bigger one and a bigger one.

And that's just the approach that we've taken and we've always tried to, to level up every time we, we do a deal, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's something in that and it has worked for you. The team at Aspen HR recently published a short white paper targeted at searchers Entitled A New CEO's Guide to Human Resources it lays out the key items you should be thinking about as you transition…

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Yeah, so in 2021. Now not all the numbers I'm given here are pro forma so they assume we have the business for know the full 12 months of the year. So in 2021 we jumped from 2 million in 2020 to 14.4 million in 2021. And E E jumped from 200,000 in 2020 to 2.6 in 2021.

That's because we made the two acquisitions in, in, in 2021. So we took, we acquired them both using fully debt funded. So we took on 4.7 million in alternative debt as we call it.

So it's like, don't know if you have the same term but it's basically like the venture debt. So extremely high interest product where you have you know, drawdown fees, high margin. So the exit fees and all, all in all the margin on that when everything was considered is probably about 20%.