EP062 – Think You Know Private Equity? Discover Evergreen’s Buy and Hold Model with Sydney Hockett
Why Listen?
Discover how Evergreen’s unique long-term investment strategy sets them apart in the MSP space.
Learn the key metrics and qualitative factors that can make your MSP business attractive to acquirers.
Gain insights on optimizing your business for potential future acquisition while maintaining operational efficiency.
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Connect with Sydney Hockett on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydney-hockett/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here – https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We created It’s a Numbers Game Podcast to help MSP owners learn and understand how to build and maintain a financially healthy MSP business. In this podcast series, MSP business owners like you will learn the fundamental steps, the tips and tricks, the dos and don’ts to achieve MSP financial growth.
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript;
Dan: Thanks for joining us today. I’m your regular co host Daniel Welling, along with Adam Morris. And today we’re joined by, Sydney from Evergreen. Sydney, welcome along.
Sydney: Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Dan: And, and Sydney, we’ve sort of half met in so far as, I actually saw you present at a, Kaseya event, in December, 23. And, you’ve also almost met Adam, your paths crossed, at, at a recent it nation event, but, for Sydney, I was, yeah, really, really interested to, to hear you speak at the Kaseya event and, perhaps for our.
Dan: Our listeners, you could perhaps just give us a bit of a background, about Evergreen.
Sydney: Absolutely. No, I hopefully we’ll meet more officially. both of you at an event this year, we’re very present as though. But absolutely by way of introduction, I personally am the vice president of M& A at Evergreen and broadly oversee our MSP M& A, which is the vast majority of where Evergreen focuses.
Sydney: We spun out of a larger private equity firm back in 2017, and the impetus behind starting Evergreen is that we wanted to invest on a much longer term time horizon than your typical private equity models of buy a business and sell it in a couple of years. So we actually never sell our businesses. Our mission is really to be a permanent home for companies.
Sydney: Within that, As I mentioned, been very focused on the MSP space. We have got a portfolio of nearly 80 MSPs globally at this point. The bulk of those are in North America, but over the last year and what brings us here today is, we’ve been really excited to expand geographically, primarily into the UK and then Australia, New Zealand as well, and really start to grow our portfolio across the region.
Sydney: I think the other piece about evergreen that’s a bit different than some of the other aggregators you may see out there is that we don’t integrate our businesses. So we’re very committed to a more decentralized operating model where we retain the brands and teams and all of the good things have already been built in the businesses and operate them.
Sydney: Within our broader group, where we do provide, you know, kind of a centralized support team to help solve the pain points in our businesses, capitalize on our scale, you know, interact with vendors, but without kind of destroying some of the inherently really incredible things that, you know, founders have spent years, building in their MSPs.
Sydney: So very high level, but a little bit of background on Evergreen.
Dan: Yes. Certainly a different model as you, as you described to the, some of the other aggregators in the, in the market. So, silly question. If, if you’re never gonna sell,what is the, you know, in, in a hundred years time, will there, will evergreen just be, a hundred years bigger in the future?
Dan: Or what’s, how does that work?
Sydney: Hopefully. no, it’s a good question. I think really the inspiration for us came from Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett’s model of value investing. If you look at Berkshire, they, they invest on very long term hold periods. And the idea is that if you can compound. Organically growing businesses over very long periods of time and then continue to reinvest cash flow that our businesses generate into further acquisitions.
Sydney: It’s a very efficient use of capital and generates kind of exponential returns compared to those that you might see in a much shorter time period. So, you know, we certainly have. shareholders and investors that need to see liquidity and return on investment along the way and can get into that. We do have mechanisms, you know, every 5 to 7 years or so that allow for that.
Sydney: Kind of liquidity as we think about evergreen, you know, in the long term, we are backed to be a forever hold model. And so continuing to have investors that support us in that mission and are excited about kind of buying in for a forever hold model.
Dan: and, so would you have,like, pension funds, for example, could my pension fund be invested in Evergreen then is, would that be the sort of investor you’d have?
Sydney: That’s right. So we actually, I mentioned we spun out of a larger private equity firm, Alpine Investors. They are based here in the U. S. in San Francisco. They are our capital backer, and so it’s their limited partners that ultimately are invested in Evergreen, and that’s exactly right. It’s institutional capital from pension funds, endowments.
Sydney: Alpine is actually a certified B corporation here in the U. S. So, you know, a lot of money coming from. Very, I call it socially responsible places that, you know, we’re excited to generate returns for.
Dan: Very good.
Adam: Sydney, just a question around not integrating, how do you generate that additional value then? And the returns for investors, you know, without the synergies, without the scaling, efficiencies, how does that work?
Sydney: Yeah, it’s a really good question and I think one of the first ones we normally get asked. And I think the reality is in, if you look at the very near term, call it a year or two post acquisition, we may be leaving a few dollars on the table of net worth. By not completely centralizing tech stacks, you know, cutting potentially redundant positions if you are integrating.
Sydney: But I think the reality is if you look at a lot of the more integrative strategies over the first couple of years, you tend 30 percent customer churn, and that’s a really big number. And ultimately Not a piece of the puzzle that we’re willing to sacrifice for some of the cost savings. And I think our time horizon is important as we think about that.
Sydney: I think that model can work well for buyers who are going to sell the entire entity off in a short period of time because it’s important for them to kind of maximize the returns they’re generating on a much quicker time period. For us, we want each of our businesses to continue to grow organically for a very long period of time.
Sydney: If you do things like changing tech stacks that hurt customers, you know, cut out positions that are integral to a specific business that makes it hard to effectively organically grow for the long term, which is ultimately what we’re focused on. At the end of the day, when you look at, roll up strategies there, they’re growing quickly through acquisition.
Sydney: But I think something we’re really proud of is we’ve done, you know, nearly 80 acquisitions and in aggregate, those businesses are growing 15 percent plus organically as well.
Dan: And, how many of the, 80, 80 acquisitions, have the founders stayed on in a role,and how,how important is that to the sort of organic growth of, you know, subject to the size of MSPs that you’re typically buying?
Sydney: Yeah, it’s a good question. I would say roughly 20 percent of our businesses are still founder run. I think generally people are selling their business for a reason, and oftentimes that reason is they are ready to move on, do something else, or at the very least, maybe not play the kind of chief everything officer role that you often see in these businesses.
Sydney: And so, we have a very built out talent pool. Recruiting program at Evergreen, Designed to kind of backfill leaders that transition out. We always want to see some form of transition period, make sure we’re not rocking the boat, too much, get new people up to speed, learn the culture, learn the people, make sure it’s a good fit.
Sydney: That said, we obviously do have some businesses that are still founder run. I think for us, our model is that we always want to place someone at a business. And if it’s not kind of a more classic founder transitioning out, we place a new MD or CEO. we may place someone in a VP of growth or kind of other revenue generating role alongside the founder.
Sydney: The idea there is. One, to help take the business to the next level. But two, also we want to make sure we’re long term succession planning. founders aren’t going to want to stay around forever. How do we make sure, you know, we’re getting the best next person in that business. and alongside that, we’re retaining the entire rest of the team.
Sydney: So I think every situation looks a little bit different. Some businesses have more built out management teams than others. And we have flexibility to kind of approach those, on a case by case basis.
Dan: And it is a recruitment then what one of the sort of centralized shared services then because I guess you’ve got your own little micro marketplace really haven’t you so you can get progression from someone’s in a in a senior role in one business and there’s no opportunity to progress so but they can perhaps move to the sort of next level up in a in another group of business.
Sydney: That’s right. So it is what one of the kind of centralized services we’ve got. We’ve actually got, you know, recruiting function at the evergreen level and then also at our kind of umbrella MSP leadership team. And they help with recruiting, you know, all the way from executives, even all the way down to the technical level.
Sydney: In some cases, I would say. With everything that is in that kind of centralized support bucket, I, it’s opt in, so we’re not mandating any of these things, you know, if you need help building out a sales and marketing program, help with recruiting, help with your financial reporting, those resources are there again, to help solve pain points, but it’s not a kind of top down dictation.
Sydney: but that’s right. You know, I think the other piece that’s exciting about our talent model and our operational model is there is. You know, for really high performers within the evergreen ecosystem, there’s opportunity for, kind of career expansion beyond what they, people may have otherwise seen in a specific business.
Sydney: And so if we look at, you know, our, again, umbrella MS, MSP team, and some of our regional leaders, a lot of those people have been our most high performing business leaders who have ultimately wanted to take on more and scaled up.
Dan: Really, really interesting. so I guess, moving on for our listeners to perhaps some of the attributes that, that you look for, both in terms of that, that their numbers, it’s a numbers game, and,and also the sort of, that the position that. That you want to find them in terms of their motivations to,to, to want to work with you.
Dan: So, perhaps you could run us through some of your scorecard elements
Sydney: Absolutely. You think there’s both quantitative and qualitative on our scorecard and both are equally as important. maybe to start with some of our kind of baseline quantitative metrics, we typically look at businesses and I’ll speak in pounds for the purposes of this, but that are kind of 4 to 500, 000 pounds of EBITDA.
Sydney: And that usually translates to kind of roughly 2. 5 to 3 million. And, Revenue or turnover is kind of our size minimum. We would like to see businesses that are at least 50 percent recurring and in recurring we include both, you know, your recurring products that’s like Microsoft as well as recurring services.
Sydney: Those 2 things are really what I call kind of our tripwire criteria. Once we get in, you know, let’s say those boxes are checked. Some of the other things we pay a lot of attention to are customer retention. You know, it’s, it, as every business leader knows, it’s hard and it’s expensive to get new clients.
Sydney: Are you retaining the customers you have and upselling them? Is a sign of a really strong business. Is the business growing, organically is something we care a lot about. Do you have a top customer that makes up a significant portion of your revenue that may be risky? Those are some of the quantitative things we index pretty heavily on.
Sydney: On the qualitative side, again, equally as important things that, you know, matter to us are quality of team. You know, do you have a leadership team in place or is the founder wearing a ton of different hats? Is there a lot of key man risk there? are your books clean? Are you able to pull your financials and have your revenue lines and cogs broken out?
Sydney: And you know, these, a lot of these things are not as easy to, you know, Slap a metric on but are very indicative of kind of the quality of a business.
Adam: I was just wondering, Sydney, if,if in that list that you’ve just reeled off, if there’s anything different, for your model versus perhaps someone looking for a shorter term, for a shorter term return, nothing leaps out for me, but is there something perhaps more on the quantitative, qualitative side?
Adam: Yeah, I think some of the things around the team are probably things that we index heavier on then maybe not so much on the time frame, but on the non integrating that matter to us. So You know, if you have in a rollup model, you may have already have a really strong sales leader in the business you’re tucking another one into.
Sydney: So you don’t care so much about that existing at the business you’re acquiring versus for us, you know, any business that has a really strong,new revenue generating team is a huge plus, and that’s something we’re ultimately going to want to build regardless, you know, if you have a business where the team is running on all cylinders and potentially understaffed at the moment, again.
Sydney: Maybe less, less of a concern for more of a roll up strategy where the idea is they have other talent they can immediately, kind of add to that business with versus us, the concern there is the businesses, you know, running too hot. We may not be able to operate it as efficiently going forward. you know, depending on what that looks like.
Sydney: So I think there’s some of the things that the operational model probably dictates how heavily we weight them. In our model. but I would imagine that there are similar pieces of this on most acquirers scorecard.
Adam: and with your expertise across the board, do you ever look at businesses which maybe are weak in certain areas? you know, maybe they got lots of good clients. they’re just not turning the sorts of top tier profit that they could be. And do you look at that and think, actually they’re a good solid business.
Adam: And with our expertise, we can generate that, you know, in perhaps the first two or three years or something or not.
Sydney: and I think that’s been an exciting part of how many acquisitions we’ve done and kind of the maturity we’ve built in our operational teams is that we do have the ability to do that and feel confident in the value that we bring You know, I think we’ve always done well on the do no harm piece in terms of not selling and not integrating.
Sydney: But the next question has been, how do we make them better? And so looking at a business that may be, you know, for whatever reason, lower profit margin or things like that. I think we feel confident that we can help turn that around. You know, we’ve got a full kind of organic growth team. that encompasses things from, you know, implementing regular price increases, leveraging, you know, a global workforce where that makes sense.
Sydney: are you incentivizing your team correctly? You know, is your account management and sales team actually incentivized to bring in new logos, grow the existing book of business things that, you maybe founders haven’t had the time, to think about that we can help implement take the business to the next level.
Sydney: So the short answer would definitely be yes.
Dan: and then, so what I’m hearing here is that, you’re probably looking. the same targets as the shorter, the shorter term buyers as well. So, if, if you’re not,uh,looking at different businesses, then presumably this now flips to the, it’s the buyer now in terms of their choice, if they’re talking to you and to some, to, to some other aggregators,presumably that’s where your overall business model becomes how you differentiate to those offers.
Sydney: Absolutely. I mean, it’s, I don’t think it’s a secret that, it’s busy in the MSP space from an MNA standpoint and. Quite a few profiles of buyers have realized, you know, how valuable these businesses are. And I think for all the reasons that we started to like them in the first place, mission critical services, really predictable revenue, resilient business model.
Sydney: I think that proved out through everything in the macro economy that we’ve seen in the last couple of years. and so, you know, no, no fault to anybody. They are great businesses, but there’s a lot of options. And so, you know, I think what I would say To sellers is even if you’re not looking to sell now I think it’s a valuable exercise to start thinking about, you know, if and when that time does come like what is important to you?
Sydney: Everybody’s gonna have a list of priorities Valuation is going to be somewhere near the top of that, but I think there’s a lot of things that also fall into that. And there’s probably similar things on everybody’s list, just in a slightly different order. And so having some clarity on what’s really important to you, as you think about the next home for your business can help kind of sift through what I would imagine is hundreds of emails every MSP already has in their inbox from people like me.
Dan: Absolutely. and I guess therefore, Uh,as we’ve as we spoke spoken about before, it really becomes about education and also building those relationships in the marketplace for when the when the time is right. So, so we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about your criteria and we’re sort of getting now into the criteria of the, of the seller.
Dan: so, you, you of course mentioned VA valuation. and, and in fact, just one, one point that I meant to mention on valuation was,how.I use the term not normalized, but I don’t know if that’s a normal term where we’re making sure we’re saying EBITDA after market competitive, shareholder, active shareholder remuneration.
Dan: And just to be clear, that’s the same model that you work on.
Sydney: That’s right. We were looking at either normalized or another would be adjusted EBITDA. and so, you know, I think that’s both things like making sure there’s adequate shareholder compensation there, but also, you know, are there expenses running through the business that would not be there going forward?
Sydney: Were there kind of one time things like an office build out or things like that? They’re not ongoing expenses or are all things we would factor in.
Dan: Very good. And, and so, I guess, that valuation and deal structure, perhaps you could talk to us just a little bit about what you see in the market there.
Sydney: Sure. Yeah. So from a valuation standpoint, like we just talked about, we are the way we value businesses is to place a multiple on EBITDA unadjusted or normalized EBITDA. and at the end of the day, you know, you’re effectively looking at the cash flow of these businesses. What that multiple is can vary depending on a lot of the things we just discussed.
Sydney: you know, in that. In that scorecard. and so, you know, I think you see a wide range of multiples. and, you know, happy to talk through some more specifics there. But, it’s going to depend on every business. I think it’s hard to say, you know, without getting into the numbers exactly what evaluation looks like.
Sydney: What I will say is, you know, I think the form that value comes in is something important to think about for sellers. And what I mean by that is the structure of the deal. How does that tie in with your personal objectives? You know, are you looking to exit the business and is, you know, having a lot of that value tied up in multiple years of performance based payouts?
Sydney: Is that what you’re looking for? Or would you rather cash out, you know, and, you know, An exit right away and that can play into the valuation as well. Some of the key components of what that can look like are, as I just mentioned, cash at close. So you get paid out, you know, cash at close at the time of closing of the deal.
Sydney: You walk away, you know, with that money. We tend to do very cash heavy deals on our end. Next kind of most common form of structure is an earn out. typically this is a piece of the valuation that is tied to performance over the first couple of years post close. you know, we tend to tie earn outs to EBITDA growth.
Sydney: Sometimes you’ll see them tied to MRR growth or retention. but the idea is that it kind of aligns incentives for both the buyer and seller to, you know, maximize performance of the business and in the years, following the acquisition. A more, a slightly less common, structure form that we’ve used more recently in the past that can be valuable as a seller note.
Sydney: This is effectively a loan from the seller to the buyer where we’ll say, you know, we will pay you out this amount. and usually it’s over a five year timeframe and the idea is you earn interest on that. So you are earning interest quarterly as that seller note accrues. And then at the end of that time period you get.
Sydney: you know, that, that balloon payment. I think what’s exciting about seller notes as compared to earnouts is while they’re a longer time period, you’re actually earning additional money in terms of interest and it’s also not performance contingent. So this can be a way to kind of bridge evaluation gap, recognize higher value as the business continues to grow without.
Sydney: You know, requiring certain performance metrics of the business to be hit. The other piece that I think comes up a lot is the idea of retained equity. This again can take a lot of different forms and retained equity in and of itself implies that, you know, you retain a portion of equity in your business.
Sydney: In a more traditional PE model, the idea is that then when it gets sold again, You get that proverbial second bite of the apple. And for evergreen, we do, you know, we do have an equity role option. We do not do retained equity in a specific business, but rather you could roll a portion of your proceeds into the broader evergreen portfolio.
Sydney: And so participate in the upside of the performance of all, you know, 80 of our businesses. and you know, We do have liquidation events that allow, kind of you to see a return on your investment kind of every seven years or so. We,
Dan: yeah, the, the fact the valuation topic overall,has a really big bearing in terms of the deal structure and, and the profile of risk and,and, really good summary of the options there. I guess the fifth variant would be some kind of, Combination of one or one or more of those.
Dan: so you might choose again to bridge the gap. you might choose to have some cash,maybe a bit of burnout, maybe a bit of seller note and, and then maybe a bit of retained equity as well. Have you ever done one that,that bonkers or, does it tend to be just one or two?
Sydney: all of the above, I can think of a few deals that have a piece that have all four of these, in them. And, you know, I think we try and start on the simpler end, but it’s always a conversation, right? And we want to work with sellers to get to, you know, a deal that. It works on both ends. and sometimes that means getting a little bit creative with the structure.
Dan: Very good. And,just thinking, just thinking out loud,if I’m a senior member of the team, maybe I’m not a shareholder at the moment,and, and, and the decision has been made to, to,to, to be acquired. is there an opportunity for me as a senior manager to, To almost buy in.
Sydney: Do you have like a sort of EMI type scheme across the group or across individual businesses? a good question. I mean, I think at the time of close, you know, we are not allocating equity directly to people who are not owners. That said, we obviously have many situations where owners would like to compensate, you know, employees who have helped them build to where they are today and, you know, be excited about.
Sydney: The acquisition. And so we have helped structure, you know, quite a few, situations where you and owner may roll their equity and allocate that to a trust, for example, that’s in the name of key employees. And so that when that those shares do liquidate, they’re actually allocated to those employees. And so, there are ways in which we, you know, I think up to owners and sellers discretion on who they want to allocate that to.
Sydney: And then, over time with an evergreen for the leaders of our businesses. You know, let’s say someone else has stepped into the general manager role. we do have incentive plans that can involve some form of equity buy in as well.
Dan: and I guess in terms of,being prepared. So, we like the idea of,of,of a future exit and,and we was wanting to work now on improving our business to, to optimize that, that, that point in the future. Um,what would you be looking for in terms of financial maturity of those businesses,without putting words in your mouth that they have some sort of regular management account in production and review process that they’re really tight on debtor days.
Dan: you know, what are the sort of things that you look for that are our listeners should be thinking about.
Sydney: Yeah, it’s a great question. And, you know, we see a Very wide array, of things. I think at the end of the day we’re willing to work through quite a lot. that said, you know, I think, kinda speaking of kinda where we started the conversation, pe we’ve seen some, a lot of value in people that involve, are involved in some of these vendor communities and peer groups.
Sydney: K say, you know, ConnectWise, there’s a lot of others. and some of those accountability practices that they have in place are really valuable and. But I think from a baseline, it’s really having a clean set of books. You know, are you allocated, are you splitting out your revenue lines?
Sydney: Can we see where product is flowing through? Can we see where managed services is? Can we see where cloud is? and being able to delineate those things. And it’s helpful for us to understand that from a revenue mix standpoint. but it’s also helpful for you as a business owner. Like, do you know if your clients are profitable?
Sydney: Are you tracking when clients add users and ultimately charging for them, adding them to contracts? Are you allocating your cogs correctly and understanding the profitability of your different lines of business? And, those are the type of things that are the differentiating factors between businesses that may be struggling.
Sydney: With margin expansion,and ones that aren’t. And so, you know, I think the baseline is a really clean set of books and proper, you know, proper accounting, and so I would highly encourage that it’s going to make the sale process so much easier because we’re going to get into the weeds on that stuff and it’s always a little bit painful, but the more detailed it is, the better.
Sydney: so yeah, that, that would be my advice there.
Dan: very good. and,and I guess in terms of,you, you sort of to touched on there that you are gonna get into the weeds on this. You know, there is gonna be due diligence, financial due diligence in involved in the process. so, your tips for,for people in terms of their prep preparation.
Dan: we’ve, we, we’ve had some that are. Working on their, on their data room years in advance and others that are like, No, don’t do that. It’s you know, it’s a waste of time. Just do it all. You know, when you’re when you’re in the process, do you have a view on what the right balance there is?
Sydney: I think it really depends on the state of things. You know, if you’ve got really clean accounting and you know, you’re very detailed, it’s not going to be that hard for you to pull everything you need during diligence. If you’re starting from a place where maybe things are a bit messier, it’s probably worth investing some of that time upfront and ultimately it’s probably going to help on the valuation front as well, because, you know, the less we can see, the harder for it is to, it is for us to truly understand, you know, the business.
Sydney: So, I think maybe to walk through what we’re going to ask you for, we have kind of four key parts of our diligence, and the first is going to be a huge data dump with Evergreen, everything from customer contracts, all your financials, insurance policies, MSAs, employment agreements, all of that. one of the big pieces that we ask for is monthly revenue by customer by type.
Sydney: And so what we’re trying to understand here is getting into that retention piece I mentioned. We want to see how much, you know, your customer spent last year on each revenue line versus how much they’re spending this year and what that looks like. And the second piece is financial diligence.
Sydney: So This is going to be basically a mini audit and probably the least fun part of the process. But, you know, we use a third party provider as most firms do that has done every deal with us. So they do understand MSPs, but really dig into the nitty gritty and create kind of a full view of the business factoring in everything from, you know, new hires that need to be made, new business that is signed that maybe we haven’t taken into account and everything else.
Sydney: We will do customer diligence and we do this through a third party, so there’s no mention of evergreen or an acquisition. They reach out on behalf of your company and say, you know, we’re running a basically a verbal customer and PS survey. Are you satisfied? Are you not? We have the owners reach out to customers ahead of time so they know it’s coming and they can vet the question list as well.
Sydney: And then the final piece is legal diligence, which, you know, mostly happens between the lawyers and counsels, but, you know, getting the purchase agreement and all of that in place. My advice there would be to have, have counsel that you trust and that knows what’s important to you. lawyers can spend a lot of time haggling over things that neither side cares about.
Sydney: and so understanding what’s important to you and making sure your team knows that I think it can be very helpful to have someone who’s gone through some form of M& A transaction, before as well.
Dan: Very good. Very good. And, yeah, lots, lots there for our, our listeners to,to digest. we’re,we’re pretty much on, on time. And, it’s normally around this time in an episode that we’d offer a shameless plug to our guests. but I think we’ve kind of been doing that all the way through in this case.
Dan: So, maybe if, any of our listeners have got follow up questions or would like to chat, Chat more about this. how best, can they reach out to you?
Sydney: Yeah, on the Evergreen website, which is evergreenSG. com, my phone number and email are listed on the contact page. So, feel free to reach out to me that way. LinkedIn works too. Always happy to have a conversation.
Dan: Very good. any final thoughts, Adam?
Adam: Well, no, just really invaluable advice, I think. Just such good content actually and a lot to think about and reflect on. And,I think this has been said before several times. But you know, I think my, one piece here would be to, to. to try and run your business like you are potentially going to sell it, right?
Adam: Even if you’re not looking to sell it in the short term, you know, so all those things you’ve gone through Sydney, if you can run your business by the numbers, if you can make sure you’re on top of the profits, you know, across your clients and across the products and top of people and all the, all of the different things, then. Not only, is that positioning you for a good exit and a good valuation, it’s also positioning you for good profits and a well run business in general. and so I think, whenever we have these discussions, I think that is one of the conclusions that we always seem to come to. and,I think it just makes, you know, complete sense to do it that way.
Adam: Yeah.
Sydney: I think that’s right. I think the only caveat would be to not, I think there’s a balance of running it, As if you’re going to sell it in terms of knowing your numbers, clean books, you know, operational maturity. What I would say to not do is don’t not make hires. Don’t overrun your team because you’re trying to juice, you know, your profits for a sale.
Sydney: That’s ultimately very clear to buyers. And at the end of the day is something we then have to bear the consequences of down the line. And so I would say to on that front, keep running it as if you weren’t selling. So
Adam: So, so, so, so that’s a really interesting point. And we better not get into the weeds there, but absolutely you’re a good buyer is going to see that anyway, they’re going to spot that in the due diligence. so those cost savings that you think you’re making probably, you know, aren’t necessarily actually going to result in the outcome you’re after anyway, so good point.
Dan: no, no sack in the sales team a few months before going to market. yeah, no, that’s, that’s, yeah, really good, really good advice. And, yeah,great episode. Thanks ever so much for,for coming on, on the podcast and,I’m sure we’ll be speaking again in the future and, seeing you at lots of community events, over the, over the coming months and years.
Sydney: Absolutely. Thank you both so much for having me and excited to be in this space more and spend some more time over in the UK as well.
Adam: Great. Thanks Sydney.
Sydney: Have a good one.