How to Build a Global M&A Machine with Local Expertise Part 2

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Back to the episode.

I'm Kisam Patel and you're listening to M and A Science where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during M and A deals.

Foreign.

Scientists welcome to the M and A Science Podcast where we learn from the best in M and A to uncover proven techniques for enterprise value creation. If you're interested in learning more about how to optimize your M and A practice or want to get involved with our community of forward thinking M and a practitioners, visit ma science.com subscribe to our free weekly newsletter. You want to keep up with us on the go, head over to LinkedIn and follow M and A Science. I'm your host, Kisan Patel, Founder and CEO at Deal Room and chief scientist at M and A Science. Welcome back to part two of this podcast interview with Syndra Kelleras Poland, head of M and A at Fisma. Fisma is a leading provider of cloud based business software specializing in accounting, payroll.

Invoicing, tax and HR solutions.

Bisma has over 16,000 employees serving over 2 million customers across Europe and Latin America.

If you missed part one, I recommend giving that a listen first.

Otherwise let's pick it up right where we left off. If I were to pick up a buy side banker in this new market for their expertise, I don't wanna pay banker fees on the buy side because I feel like that's stupid not to knock any buy side bankers out there. I get it on the sell side because you're creating an auction and there's like a case around the value created. But the buy side can I find like an ex corp dev person and saying hey I'll put you on like an hourly engagement or something like that? I'm just curious of like absolutely, you.

Can do that as well with the buy side banker instead of a buy side banker.

Yes, but the buy side banker is going to want fees.

He will have fees typically on a percenter deal size.

Yeah, I like how you're being very honest with me. I really appreciate that. What's the typical percentage range?

Oh it can vary but it also for us a buy side banker that's as much a door opener as anything else. And to have that cultural aspect and to know the market because once we have an loi then the visma M and a train takes over and then we run the deal in our own way. So getting up to an ly that's where we see that they can actually be helpful.

Still a lot of fees to pay. Can you negotiate the fees?

Absolutely. Nothing is signed before it's signed.

Okay, so we negotiate the fees. Would that be a thing? Is find an ex Corp debt person I feel like they would be as good if not better.

Oh yeah. And absolutely. And there are these platforms where you can find M and a talent.

If I were to start a business now that's like an interesting opportunity is have I always think tech enabled right away because I come from tech. But if you can bring in folks that had that deal expertise that don't have that mindset of the salesperson of I need A commission on every single thing. I don't know. There's something there.

Absolutely, fully agree.

Somebody listening, wants to build on that. Let me know. I can't stop what I'm doing now. But glad to help out. So if we brought in the local expertise, we got comfortable doing that deal. It's probably the best thing. Any other big risk items of just like executing the deal and making it successful. That why I should or shouldn't do the deal?

In terms of risk?

Yeah. You're going first international deal or just branching out?

We're still talking about the German deal.

We're talking about the German deal. Yeah.

Okay. There are risks by default. There are tons of risks in M and A. You need to get comfortable. You're not able to diligence everything.

It's being blind to risk but then being like exponentially more blind because it's in a whole different country. Yeah, yeah.

Different culture.

That's what I'm trying to learn from you. You teach me that, I'll walk away.

Happy in different continents. When you've done 350 deals, you always have that. It's a balance. You need to understand the market, you need to understand the key DD topics, on the other hand, analysis paralysis. You need to know what's important and what's not important. You can talk yourself out of any deal. That's the easiest way to do it. Easy peasy. Then you don't do M and A. It's actually pretty easy. There is always some issues with all deals, even the slam dunk ones. There's always something that you can use as an argument not to do a deal. There is always risk. But I do think if you do a thorough dd then you do it with open eyes. You know the risks and then you say, okay, this is actually still worth it.

How do you keep the cost of diligence low? I feel like that's the other flip side because everybody will tell you due diligence. Even the point you made earlier is like you're spending more. Even looking at hiring big name consulting firm to help with diligence. Look at me, I'm Indian man. I'm cheap. I'm just like, it's in my DNA to not spend money on things that you're not going to get money back on. Which happens if you're going to do a deal and all of a sudden you're like we can't do this deal or you get deal fever. Then where I'm invested in and feel like I have to do this deal because I'm already financially invested into it in this mass.

Well we are a trade buyer, we're an industrial company. Are we concerned about fees? Absolutely. That's also why we have an in house FTD team doing that in house. If I look at the returns on that versus using an external, what do you call it? FTT Financial dd.

Oh fdd. Okay.

We have people can do financial dd. We have three in house M and A lawyers. So to compare that to having sort of external lawyers, that's a big difference. Then we have tech people only doing tech M and A also a big difference. And then we have the whole operation team that's helping us out the commercial aspects, et cetera, et cetera.

Economies of scale sound great. Can I borrow your team once in a while?

We can discuss an hourly rate.

I'm going to go invite them out for a beer.

Absolutely. No. Yeah, it's three for two. Two for three. We do 30 to 40 deals per year. So that's also when you calculate your IRRs on having people instead of consultants on this. That of course helps a lot.

Okay. I have a feeling and this actually just putting it out there, my current approach, I do go on those platforms like Upwork and other platforms fin talent and we'll hire freelancers or referrals. I'll go talk to folks like I know like you and tell you hey I'm trying to save some money. And you're like oh I know somebody that just left a role and they're just freelancing right now. Perfect. That's been my biggest wins. I know maybe if I was doing the international deal like I'd do a little more legwork to find the resource. Is that fair to say is like a good approach for, for a first timer?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's totally legit.

Can I ask you questions like how you guys operate over there over visma. One reason I'm asking cause I've talked to so many corporate development professionals and it's interesting. You can have a PE backed company and they really are maybe just consolidating industry and there's some sort of direct correlation of this corporate team's performance to the growth of that company revenue wise. And then you have a larger strategic where a lot of it's like supporting the leadership like we talked about and really facilitating that. And then I guess structurally too of just there's strategics that almost operate more like private equity firms in terms of the way they're structured. They're sort of like a good financial discipline. Investments in Investments out. Because a company like yours have done both. You've made some exits out.

Yeah.

And then there's ones that are very, just strategic, extremely, like moonshot bets that it doesn't make any sense till 10 years later when they can tell everybody I told you so. Where do you sit in that world? Because I'm confused. I've tried to do my diligence and at first I thought you guys were like the typical strategic. But then the more I looked at it, I'm like that kind of not.

It's a legit question. We do look at us as a trade buyer. We do look at us as a strategic buyer. But at the same time we are also maybe more opportunistic than your average trade buyer. So if you look at the divestments we've done historically, that's all been we've divested our services, our BPO division, we've divested our IT consulting division, we've divested the hosting division, we have divested retail software. The things we've divested has been because we want to focus on really being that call it SMB, erp, cloud champion in Europe and Latin America. So I think we're there now.

Can you tell me a little bit about that? What prompted the company to go focus in that specific area and divest those assets?

I can of course only relate to the last 16 years, but if I look at it, I say where have we performed best? And it's that SMB counting, payroll, invoicing, tax, that's been the business unit that has always performed the best and been at North Star and continues to be right for the American listeners that would typically be into it. So in many ways we're sort of an intuit of Europe that business is just inherently much better than a services business and it's value thereafter as well. Having that sort of very clear strategic vision that we've had and HD as well. They've been a good owner. We've been working on this together and having that strategic mindset in really nurturing that part of Visma and now actually that still and the lion's share of what we're doing.

That makes sense in terms of how the strategy has evolved, I guess clicking down in how you operate like you buy so many companies. What happens to these companies because a lot of them still carry their same name. They're not Visma this Visma Norway, Visma Denmark, they're all operating their independent brands and I'm wondering is this like some of the software roll up companies a Lot of popping up Canada. Any new ones? As long as one big behemoth out there that don't really do a lot of integration. They sort of do some pretty light touch stuff on the back end and then let them run. That's the playbook basically it's just arbitrage the valuation or scale. What does that look like for you?

I wouldn't necessarily compare us with the ones you were throwing out there.

That's just an example I've seen.

I think we are inherently different but in terms of that call it soft integration approach. I agree. We also have that even though we were probably 100 business units when I took over as head of M and A and then We've probably done 200 plus deals since then, but we're still 180 or 190 business units now. So it's not fair to say that we don't integrate and we don't merge.

So some can merge.

So we do absolutely do that. When it makes sense we do it. But I do think if you look at it holistically, we like to buy entrepreneur led businesses that has a driven entrepreneur to still have that on board.

Founder.

Yeah, founder. Five years after between 70 and 80% of all founders are still on board. Nisma.

What?

And I do think that's pretty spectacular. So that's.

How do you keep them be out of there? I'm like done.

I do think that soft approach in terms of integration. We don't call it integration by the way, we call it onboarding. For me at least it sounds much better. But having said that they still have a very strong ownership feeling that they still own their own company even though it's actually owned by Visma. Might be an earn out for one year, three or five years but the reality is we give them a lot of go to market freedom. But then we are extremely rigorous on a few but very specific elements. First of all, financial reporting. Fifth working day every month. Previous months reported full P and L, full balance sheet, full cash flow statement. That's super important. And after all we are working with accounting and reporting and tax systems. So it's a bit. We should eat our own medicine. You're able to work with the companies much more hands on than you are if you're getting the previous month on day 20 in the next month it's already old. Having that fifth workday every month gives you actually fresh data that you can steer from. We are very data driven. So that's one element. Tech is the other element. We're extremely Rigorous security. There is so much. You would know this as well, that cyber security, very important. I would even argue probably tech and cyber. That's the single biggest reason why we pull out of deals. If you don't believe that there is the right vision for the tech, we will pull out of the deal in a heartbeat. We are almost religious on this. It doesn't need to be all fancy and super multi tenant cloud from day one. But you need to have that vision, you need to have that belief and you also need to have the organization to do it. If you don't believe you have that, then we will be quite upfront about that. VISMA is the biggest network of B2B software SaaS entrepreneurs globally. And there's almost 200 of them out there in the VISMA ecosystem that are working and working together, collaborating, measuring, comparing. What type of KPIs are you following? Okay, why are you doing so much better than I am? Okay, what do I need to do here to increase that? Et cetera, et cetera. So we always see that if you look at the companies we acquired in 24, back again to the type of businesses we acquire, good businesses, great businesses, I would argue. So they performed almost a rule of 50 on average. That's second to none. It's really great businesses. And adding the fact that it was 33 businesses that we acquired last year makes that pretty unique, pretty solid.

What was the rule of 50?

Remember, you take the growth rate plus the margin, the cash EBITDA margin that ideally should be above 40 or better. Yeah. So when you're getting close to 50, I would argue it's pretty good.

Oh, so you're taking a rule of 40 and saying you have 10.

Exactly. So that's, it's a rule of 40 metric, but the rule of 40 metric is then closer to 50.

Yeah, I like that.

And still we see after one year, because of this, because of you entering into this environment, we do see quite a big shift upwards on that rule of 40 scale. You're actually growing faster and you're earning better margins.

Because why?

Because all just becoming, just starting measuring the right KPIs. There are so much inherently low hanging fruits in these businesses that when they come into a professionalized system with a professionalized board, you start really start to push on the right things. And that's also one aspect where we are pushing a lot is around adding the right competence to the various companies. And this is again, no companies, no process is the same. So if there is a company struggling or is scaling super Fast. Maybe you should have someone who has scaled a software business before. Maybe you should add HR competence or if it's a company that has a great product but struggling a bit with go to market channel, whatever it is. Then you make sure to add that competence. Someone who's. We have entrepreneurs in this group that have grown their companies from 0 to 150 million euro arrival. There is a lot of competence throughout the group. Adding that mix of competence to the various companies on a board level, I do think that is very important.

It's interesting you have things that you described that are very like typical strategic. Then you got elements that sound very private equity like as well. A couple of things I noted that you mentioned for retainment of leaders was burnout like 1-5T is pretty common. You also mentioned just reporting accountability right off the bat getting your numbers in within five days a month. And the other piece you mentioned developing the community between the leadership that they're there really comparing notes and getting value from each other as a part of the visma community. That sounds pretty good.

Yeah. Particularly in that. Right. You even see AI is a big thing and how to monetize on AI and how to use it. And we have several hundred AI experiments all across the group.

I'm still going back to our deal. The offer you put on the table to buy our company.

You need to prove your growth rate though.

I got that. Don't worry. You got a great FTD team. They're going to make sure. I was thinking about all the stuff I could buy with it because I could get that house on the slopes and probably a nice SUV to get up and down that mountain and stuff. How do you convince me? The money part is good but I'm still. I can easily get this thing another 20 million. ARR. That's no problem. Like why don't I wait till then? I'm just. I'm wondering like how do you negotiate and get me to want to sell now versus like I said, I'm always optimistic. It's part of the DNA of being a founder. Well hey, why don't we talk Indra a year I'll show you. I'll prove out that we're going to get another 40% growth this next year and you're going to have to put more, more, more. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like how do you convince somebody otherwise? Like timings now versus as I mentioned.

There are quite a few examples where we've talked to companies for decade plus and that's typically the case. I'm not Ready to sell. That's a perfectly legit answer. That's your prerogative as a founder. It's. I'm not willing to sell right now, Sorry, let's talk in a year, six months or five years. That's your prerogative. Still, I do believe that we have a pretty compelling story to entrepreneurs and we see that the Visma story actually resonates very well to entrepreneurs across all geos. And it's still that. Okay, so you have your own company, you continue to run that, but you still have this giant corporation behind you that will help you, that will support you, that will give you access to the most valuable network of like minded MDs, experiments, whatever it is that's going on in your own world. Adding that and the fact that you might have an earn out so that you actually are having a bit of that upside yourself so that one plus.

One are not going to bridge. Because in my head I'm like, hey, if I wait another year, you have to give me 30, $40 million more.

We've had companies that have earned way more on their earnout than on the initial ev, of course.

What does the general terms on those.

Earnouts look like again, based on what type of deal you're looking for and what type of company you're looking at.

This one, 10 million.

You could even use the rule of 40 scale V in Visma. We're still very interested in earning money as well. So I do believe rule of forte is fairly good metric.

I'd be right at 50 if I got 40% year over year plus 1 million net. That puts me at right at 50. Yeah.

So the higher rule of 40, the higher multiple you get. That's a bit of the dynamics typically.

On the earn out.

On the earn out of course, not on initial. That will be the cat fight we need to do.

Yeah, that's what I'm kind of wondering.

But you need to find that price that's equally painful. And then what's good with us as well is that we allow them to also reinvest. In Visma, you never get Visma shares as part of the initial, but as a working entrepreneur you're allowed to reinvest.

But why not? Why won't you roll over equity? That seems like the most simple thing to do.

Yes, I would say yes and no. And there are things in doing that then it's a dilution effect, et cetera, et cetera. By letting them reinvest more or less the same thing. Yes. As a founder, you're owning a small Stake of something big instead of a big stake of something small. But you still have to nurture that ownership feeling. And I do believe that is important to have that reinvestment possibility into Visma And I do believe that's, of course, also important.

That's a good point. So you want them invested in. I got a private equity firm. I'm just being frank with you here. Got a P firm that's reaching out and talking to me. They're offering the second bite of the apple. So you say you got one fund that's willing to do a minority recap. You got a buyout fund that'll let me sit back with 20, 30% of the company. These options look pretty good. How do you compete with those?

What we're bringing to the table is still pretty unique. I do have a strong belief. We have a historical track record as well that shows that, yes, you're growing faster, you're showing a more scalable operation, margins are getting better, and you still have that ownership feeling. You're still running the business as it was your own.

Is that part of what you bring into the picture? Here's kind of how we would actually support you to grow where you as a founder are visioning going.

Yeah, that's of course part of the picture.

I know I'm role playing with you right now and I know there's not enough context to make it very detailed, so I'll give in a little bit there. I can sense that's where you're going for, but we haven't been talking very long other than this podcast. Do you see that happen a lot where some company you approach and they're talking to the PE firm, blah, blah.

If you look at our competitors, that might very well be a private equity. That's just the way it is. And I do believe we offer something else. I do believe with the Visma equity earnout components. But I would still. We know what market price it looks like and we're not trying to be cheap. If this is a tier one asset for us, then it's a tier one asset for us. I know. Then it doesn't actually get down to that last dollar. It's more important to actually get that deal over the line.

There's basically a total picture element that even myself as the founder. One thing to look at dynamics of the deal, but then you're pushing that against the total picture where, hey, if you're offering a really competitive offer, a really co competitive offer with clean terms versus and there's a lot of nuances.

I would say a high degree of deal certainty as well. That is important. Right. When you close 90 plus percent of all your Lois. I do think that number speaks for itself, to be honest. Wherever we don't close an loi, there has been something typically fundamentally different that has occurred during the due diligence phase. And that happens. It happens when you buy a house and it happens when you buy a company. Something happens during the DD and just nature of the business. That's why you do dd.

You get great points. I think I'm in. I'm ready to sign a term sheet when you're. Whenever you're ready to send it over to me.

Great. It's already in your inbox.

So I got just a couple topics left. One thing to know about Visma, the business was publicly traded in the early days and around 2006 they went private. Can you tell me a little bit about what that looked like when the business went private and just specifically interested in just that relationship or ownership with private equity?

Yeah. As you were alluding to, this is the only type of Visma ownership I've seen. I've seen KKR and HD and Cinven and EIC and PE ownership angle to it. I've not seen Visma as a public relationship.

So you've seen the aftermath where it was public, went private, then they're anticipating going public again and then it. Yeah, I mean taken over by another PE firm, then went back to the original PE firm. So you can see some interesting PE drama.

Absolutely. I wouldn't necessarily call it drama. The red line in sort of the Visma PE ownership story is hg, they were the ones delisting us. And yes, they were down in a minority position, but they've always been there. They have definitely helped us in that context of being that counterparty that's always or stakeholder that's always been there for us. This is going live. Right?

You're listening. That's where I'm testing you right now.

Yeah. No, the reality is Nick Humphries and his team, I think they're doing a great job. They have also acknowledged that letting the Vispa management team do their job, that's actually very important for a PE firm. So they've given us a lot of freedom in the same way that we're giving a lot of our business units a lot of freedom as well.

Who is the biggest win when working with a peat firm like hd? What was like the stuff that really wowed you? I'm pretty impressed of smart money here.

HG in particular they are a tech investor and led by Nick Humphries who's always been in the board and is the executive chair at hd. Having that long term vision and particularly in an M and A context as well, they are of good help. We're driving the agenda. But I do think having that support from the owners in driving that agenda and helping to nurture the M and A strategy that has been of help. Great help. Absolutely. They are very tech savvy.

They encourage you to do M and A. They know the industry. Is there anything they do? Because all these private equity firms, I'm trying to be nice here, they all like brag about having a value creation model. They have these big portfolio support teams, especially at this side. Once you're over like 10 billion AUM, they have a pretty sizable portfolio support, portfolio operations, whatever you call it, teams. And they're all focused on value creation. They recruit a bunch of consultants, ex consultants in there, bankers. Do you see that being a value add for you?

Both yes and no. Hd, they have now a very good view on when to help us and when to leave us alone.

So there's a good component there like when to leave you alone.

Yeah. And as a private equity owner I do believe knowing when to help and when not to help that is almost as important as anything else.

Yeah. Examples of that of like when not to help.

We are a double digit grower organically and then M and A goes on top. Good margin expansion, 30 plus percent EBITDA margins. Business is performing fairly well. So it's also clearly the management team is doing something right. So knowing when we are doing something and knowing when actually they should probably step in and do some changes. For any given private equity owner, I would say that is imperative to know when to get your hands on the steering wheel and when to leave that to management.

So don't be an asshole. Where you're constantly pushing for more.

Probably a good sentence, good learning.

It's hard to CEOs that are PE backed that's kind of like the conundrum. It's like you need to push more growth, you need to cut costs. Which is like a never ending tale. But I think there's a good point. There's like a right when it's right and when to back away.

Yeah. And I do believe HG they also have that long term view. They've almost been a shareholder in Visma for 20 years. They know us fairly well. It's fair to say they have that long term view.

How does that work?

Is it like in the same fund for that long or do they change funds after a while?

Typically you also change funds but they believe in you.

So they keep going after investing in the company and adjusting.

Exactly. I would say it's a bit of an elaboration or an expansion of the traditional PE model where you typically own an asset for three to five years and then sell it off. But every now and then you stumble across very good assets that you actually don't want to sell and it's almost like an evergreen sort of investment. And I do believe that model that HG has applied with us, bringing along investors together with them, I do believe that for certain assets like ourselves, I do believe that has been a good.

Strategy that's played well. Sounds like it's been a good relationship. Anything that you've been like really impressed of things they've done to add value. A lot of things you described are very private equity. As we talked about earlier of the way you bring the leadership teams together and hold those kind of events and things like that. Part of me is curious too because you're just such a large company to be owned by a large private equity firm.

Yeah.

Where does that level of sophistication turn into? Because I get it when it's like a small company and you gotta be so hands on it and you're sort of like doing the M and A for that company here. Nobody's doing M and A for you. They're watching you do everything and on more the sidelines. That's why I'm curious what does that look like for them to actually add value in a company to your extent?

They know us very well. There's no bs, it's sort of straight shooters and we can talk quite directly with them. And I do believe that since they know us that well, they also know where they can provide value and probably where they should leave us alone. So whether that is opening up doors towards other companies, whatever it can be, to be honest, it can be many things.

Is it fair to say it's more like the strategy stuff? If they see here things and bring it to you as an extra pair of eyes and ears.

Yeah. The overall B2B ecosystem and supporting the long term strategy of Ismail, those type of dialogues. That's where we typically have good discussions with them as well.

PE firm makes sense how you work with a PE firm. One of the things I was curious about was it's interesting for you to expand in Europe. It's not hard to fly to these countries because they're Literally an hour flight. You can visit them and make new friends and it's pretty cool. That's the one thing I really like about Europe. But then when you take this platform and expand to Latin America, I'm curious about that because that's like a, like talk about crossing the pond. You cross like two ponds when you do that. Can you tell me like how does that work? Like, how do you see M and A being different from.

Long story short, we entered Latam through a Dutch acquisition that accidentally had a operation in Buenos Aires.

Accidentally? Like you didn't know?

Well, we knew of course, but it was relatively small back then, like 5 million euro top line or something. Now we have 60 million, probably top line, growing very fast with good margins. Right now we are the biggest Cloud SMB ERP player in Europe. 2.6 billion arrows, growing quite fast. The more we've learned around Latin America, the more it is appealing. To be honest, we've taken this multi decade view on it and just said, you know what, Latin America is actually a pretty great place to be. It's quite tech savvy. Of course, it has its issues like every other country. But I would say actually Latin America is more tech savvy than many larger economies in Europe. Even so you have multi tenant super modern cloud players in Latin America of size that you actually are struggling to find even in Europe. So I do believe that component of it important also the regulatory changes that are happening. Latin America was actually quite early on in terms of E invoicing, E tax, these type of things. Whereas Europe in that context, I don't think you have E invoicing in the US even. Right. Many countries in Europe don't even have it. Latin America is on the forefront there. So I do believe that a lot of these things is making Latin America much more appealing than what maybe people outside in actually initially believe. There is a lot of probably biases out there. Voicelat app but we look at it as a great region to continue to drive consolidation as well.

Is that because you think you're going to run out of market over here or is it, hey, this is something we can replicate the platform.

I'm not afraid of running out of total addressable market in Europe. No, Europe is very big. Even in NORWAY it's only 5, 600,000 businesses here. But even here there is still plenty of things to do. So I'm not worried about the TAM per se, but I do see an opportunity to lead a consultation in Latam. So I do think that is actually pretty appealing. It's different. Doing business in Latam is different also a little bit back to M and A is local. We have a very driven management team in Latam. We also have M and A members that are from Latam. It has that local aspect. Rust is very important. Rust is always important in ma, but I would say it's even more important in Latam. You have to build and gain trust over time. We've been in Latam now for seven, eight years. Over time we've shown that we've gradually expanded that business through M and A and organic growth. And I do believe that rumor is also running ahead of us. We have a good reputation in Latam and I think there are so many opportunities. The reality as well, our Norwegian heritage from Visma. We are a Norwegian company. Even though we are becoming more and more global. That heritage of Norwegians, we are relatively commercial and we are opportunistic, but we're also quite humble. We know that we are not kings of the world. Oslo is not the center of the universe. And I'm being humble in the fact that humble is not a weakness. It's actually a strength when you use it right. We are not going to tell anyone in Brazil or Chile or Buenos Aires how to run their own ERP business, how it works for Moslo. They will tell us how to run it, but we will help them. That goes with Spain and France and Germany as well.

Good point about the cultural compatibility.

That humbleness. I do think that is actually very important.

Find it very notable thing in Northern Europe, especially here in Norway. The whole time I spent out here.

Yeah. Humble is not necessarily a weakness. Humble is about being smart.

Is that why you skipped over America, went straight to South America?

There are several reasons. One is we've talked about intuit earlier. When you see one giant big player that's doing great, by the way, do you really want to pick up the boxing gloves for now. Short answer is probably not Europe and Latam. For now. You're becoming more and more global. But for now there is plenty of opportunities outside of the US when you.

Do these deals, do you look at synergy between your portfolio companies? It sounds like you're buying a lot of companies that sort of are going to continue growing organically and then you do some light backend integration. But is there a perspective on synergy between these acquisitions or anything like that? That's more cross selling or.

It is. It varies a lot. Again, it's a bit case by case like quite many of these companies. If you are a 10 million ARR business growing 50%, then yes, we will probably we will help you. But you're clearly doing something right.

That's the theme of this whole podcast. There is no one answer for all in M and A at all. Like anywhere in M and A, there's no one answer for all.

It's actually true. I guess that's what keeps you running for almost two decades. Every deal has its own life. There are nuances. You're learning new things, there are new cultures, there are new stuff to learn on every single deal. And I think that's we love about M and A, isn't it?

If you don't have that from a takeaway from this podcast, it's just have this adaptive agile mindset and you'll be fine.

Yeah, I do think looking at the visma M and A story as well, we have quite a lot of tools in the toolbox. We're quite pragmatic. We really try to get that deal over the line if we deem it worthwhile.

What's the future look like? What do you see for trends that's going to shape the future of M and A, the global tech industry?

Big question. How much time do we have?

All the time you got, man. You haven't kicked me out of the office yet.

It's getting dark.

Yeah, we have our four hours of wintertime daylight here. We're easing up.

Jokes aside, the reality is, and we talked a little bit about this earlier as well, the tourists from 2020, 21, 22, they're gone. But there is still so much capital going into B2B software and only in Europe last year it was established almost hundred of these type of permanent capital vehicles, only investing in B2B SaaS, software businesses, even more in the US and they all have different angles to it and unique selling points. At the end of the day, they are doing more or less the same thing, trying to roll up vertical market softwares within all types of verticals. You will continue to see a trend in that. The reality is there is so much software companies out there. Even though it's a big consolidation, new software companies are just popping up. You'll see more of that, but at the same time you will also see that more of these will struggle. You will see the ones that actually have that serial acquisition capability and the serial acquisition muscle, those would be highly valued.

That's kind of an interesting view. A lot of platforms are popping up, the ones that'll actually be able to scale to be determined. That's a pretty interesting view.

Time will Tell who that will be. But I do think you will also see a big constellation within these platforms. There's just so much money out there and everyone wants to be invested in software.

I like this. Can I come work for you? I could be a good buy side advisor, banker. Just give me a good fee structure, a couple points, a deal.

Send me a proposal.

I will. I gotta ask you though, what is the craziest thing you've seen in M and A?

Oh, that is actually a good question. Nothing actually is surprising me anymore. I've seen a lot.

I think the craziest deal toy I've seen in my life is the stuffed eagle that you have in your office. I've gone to so many offices, corp dev, but usually the biggest collections are investment banks of all these little deal toys. Every time you close a deal, they send it to the principal parties involved. I went into your office, I was like, what the hell is this? You had this eagle. I don't know what the customary Norwegian thing of creating that.

Yeah, as you say. Right. It's at least the coolest tombstone I've ever received. And it was a project called Project Eagle. I'm not going to name the company behind, but there we actually received a stuffed animal. A stuffed eagle.

I'm going to have to post it on social, so those of you interested in seeing it, follow me on LinkedIn. Syndra, this has been an awesome conversation. Thanks for taking multiple hours of your time today and helping me become a better M and A scientist.

Great. It's been a great talk. Appreciate it.

Been fun you've listened this far in this podcast. Fellow M and A scientist love to hear from you. Whether it's some feedback, topic, ideas, criticism, take the criticism so I get better at doing this. Always welcome those conversations. Usually LinkedIn's the best way to reach me. Till next time, here's to the deal.

Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M and A with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post, add a review on Apple podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help, subscribe. Standing up an M and A function or optimizing one that you already have. We're here to help and if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email Kisan K I s o n a science.com or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that's mascience.com here's to the deal. Views and opinions expressed on M and A Science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual. This podcast is purely educational and is not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.