Sale of IT Support and Telecommunications Company
The company
Well established with an experienced team of Microsoft qualified IT support staff, the company had an excellent reputation as a one touch IT support and VOIP telecoms solutions provider with over 120 customers including corporate organisations. The business had grown aggressively and achieved 64% growth in the last financial year.
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The Situation
The company had three shareholders and they made the decision to sell based on their perception that the best way to exploit the full growth potential of the business would be to do this within the framework of a larger organisation. Two of the Principals were in the key technical management positions to support the business day to day and their desire was to stay in these roles following the completion of the sale. The CEO and third shareholder was flexible in terms of his expectation of having a future role depending on the requirements of the ultimate buyer.
What Hornblower Did
After completing the Valuation Report and Sales Memorandum we launched the marketing for ITS in the middle of December 2012 and by the first week in January 2013 we had over 40 enquires and subsequently arranged 18 meetings with qualified buyers during January. We then agreed Heads of Terms with a buyer in mid-February with a view to completing in early April 2013.
Unfortunately within weeks of the target completion date the CEO of the buyer developed a serious illness and the transaction was in abeyance for 6 weeks until the company had to abort the transaction.
We then re-started the marketing process in early June 2013 and were able to secure heads of terms with a large international corporate buyer by mid-July.
WIN WIN
The quality of our ICT buyers database and Sales Documentation enabled us to achieve impressive turnaround times and agree Heads of Terms not just once but twice on this assignment and the result was a deal with an international corporate buyer that was not only at the right level in terms of value but also ticked the boxes of the Vendors in terms of having access to the appropriate resources to build the business aggressively. The icing on the cake was that all three Principals were offered permanent employment with the buyer so not only were they able to realise an excellent return on the successful company they had built to date but they also secured excellent long term employment prospects with an impressive organisation.
SOLD - October 2013
Hornblower Business Brokers – Specialists in selling IT support and consultancy businesses
