Acquisition Unlock: €210m in 5 Years

Absolutely, absolutely. I don't mean to suggest that they were predatory in some way. Nick, your point about debt being cheaper than equity?

Of course. Did you though consider outside equity as a way to, to finance this acquisition, these acquisitions?

This probably won't be too appealing to a vc, probably too small, almost absolutely too small for private equity. And even if we could find somebody to give us write an equity check, we'd be diluted away to nothing because we were Buying, you know, like one and a half million euros of ebitda. We only had a couple of hundred grand and ebitda, it just didn't make, didn't make sense.

So we felt debt funding, it was the way to go. And because of the valuation that we were buying the businesses for, I think it lends itself well to debt funding. Yeah, yeah, so, so that was 2021.

So we bought two businesses. Don't know what we were thinking buying two businesses for first day out, but we did well. Hey, opportunity knocked again, you know, and you, you had to grab it.

Not only two businesses, but one and one in a different country, one in Ireland and one in the uk. So whilst it's our nearest neighbor, still added layer of complexity. So we spent 2022 just figuring out what the hell we had done and trying to integrate the businesses together.

We got to 19.3 million in revenue in 2022. 3 million in EBITDA and successfully managed to refinance the debt within 12 months. So got that down to a 3% margin then.

Wow. Yeah, wow. So you were psyched. Yeah, 3% interest. You were psyched at this point. So you emerge from 2022 having made two acquisitions which was for your first timers here, two acquisitions, one of which was in the UK, not even in your, not even in your native Ireland.

You go from 1.2Million ish of revenue to almost to 19.3Million of EBITDA.

And you get out from under this, these, this, these loans were bridged you through. But there were extremely high interest rates according to this plan that the main street banks, High street banks had said, if you can, if you can do, if you can pull this off, we'll give you favorable terms. But you got to pull it off.

Integrate the businesses as you buy, emerge from those acquisitions as a more sizable stable business. Then we'll give you the loans at 3% interest or some more favorable rate. You did that. So you were pumped in January of 2023?