Sale of IT Support Company
The Company
A well-established IT support business, based in London, with over 15 years of trading history. The company had grown to accommodate a range of clients in the financial, hospitality, property, retail and professional services sectors. As a platform and OS agnostic provider, the company had developed a proven record for delivering innovative solutions supported by solid expertise.
The company offered a full suite of IT support services, containing the infrastructure of a customer service helpdesk. The business benefited from a range of operational and business management internal systems, ensuring efficiency and focused management of customer relationships.
This potential acquisition offered an excellent opportunity for another IT support or managed services business, seeking to acquire a provider with proven expertise in the financial and professional service sectors, and a record for delivering progressive client solutions.
For a full description of the business, please click here.
The Situation
Selecting the right type of acquirer emerged from the outset as a critical factor, as this particular sale involved more than one vendor. While the company founder and majority shareholder sought to exit the business, the remaining vendor was committed to staying with the business following a successful sale.
As is often the case in sales involving more than one vendor, it was important for us to consider the interests of the remaining vendor, as well as recognising other key members of the team who would also be remaining with the company, post-sale.
We set out to select potential acquirers with the capacity to retain the remaining vendor within the business, as well as offer the remaining vendor significant opportunities to develop his career in the future.
What Hornblower Did
With over a decade of experience, successfully selling a wide range of IT Support and Managed Services businesses, we were confident in finding a suitable acquirer to not only accommodate the interests of the remaining talent within the business, but also with the ability and track record to scale the business to the next level of growth.
We put the business to market, distributing the opportunity to our extensive database of buyers within the sector. Due to our experience of working with active, well-known and credible acquirers, the initial marketing effort was well-targeted and compelling enough to generate 160 enquiries. From this point, we were able to carefully manage the number of enquiries into a final shortlist of 5 suitable acquirers, within 5 weeks of initially marketing the business.
Within 6 weeks of beginning our marketing process, we had agreed heads of terms with the ultimate acquirer. The process was managed throughout by our M&A Director, Mark Sykes, from initial meetings with the vendor through to final offers and ‘Heads of Terms’.
SOLD – July 2019
