AI Issue 11 2017

Acquisition International - November 2017 19 Growth Through Innovation Partnering “Utilising our reputation, we use our robust international personal presence and technical expertise to search for partners from a technical and operational perspective, rather than from just a financial one. By adopting this approach, it is possible to identify and filter potential companies wherever they may be located worldwide and present a small number of high potential introductions to you that will meet all of your agreed current and future requirements.” Excitingly, John presents us with an example of SAL’s work and how it helped to benefit a client. He talks about how a well established family owned group planned to grow its business, wishing to complement its plan for strong organic growth with strategic acquisitions, in targeted, aligned and growing sectors. The CEO of this client was recommended to contact SAL by the CEO of an ex-client, highlighting the well founded reputation of SAL, and how word of mouth business provided a lot of business to the company. “Working directly with the CEO, SAL established a plan for an international trawl of companies to meet the client’s requirements. The target companies had to meet stringent EBITDA targets, have nothing but growth on their horizons and be in a narrow range of sectors of particular interest to the group. Financials are always a priority but to ensure successful post acquisition integration so are other factors such as geography, customer base synergy and culture. Importantly the targets of interest were by definition off-market. They were of a specific size and successful and as such were not on the usual intermediaries public list of companies for sale. “SAL’s well-honed but novel approach is to seek companies with identified parameters that match a significant number of the client’s requirements. SAL personnel then initiate contact with the CEO’s / senior decision makers in those target businesses, starting relationships that will allow them to eventually open discussions regarding potential alliances/acquisitions.” “Working around a number of international exhibitions as an initial focus, within the first six months SAL proposed 42 companies and, on the instructions from the client’s CEO to proceed, set up initial exploratory meetings with over 29 companies from Italy to America.” Ultimately, a fine example of SAL’s success, negotiations progressed well and the client acquired another company at the end of 2016. Since then, SAL has not stopped working and is constantly searching for new acquisition opportunities for the company. It will continue to do so for other firms within the industry, and will always look to help its clients, something which will bode well as SAL looks to cement itself as a leader within the industry. To see details of the HVAC client’s acquisition parameters, see here .