Stop Falling in Love with the Deal: Guardrails for High-Volume Acquisitions with Birgitta and Lars Elfversson

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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.

Hello M and A Scientists. Welcome to the M and A Science Podcast. This show is part of our mission to rethink how M and A is done and build the operating standard for buy side M and A. That old school seller led approach. Dead buyer led M and A is about strategy alignment and execution, putting value creation at the center of every deal. It's not about closing the deal, it's about making it successful. And that comes from learning directly from operators who've done it. You want to go deeper? We've got you covered. There's a ton of free resources on the site. Frameworks, guides, tools all built from real operator experience. We also have the M and A Science membership which gives you the full system exclusive frameworks, templates, expert Q and A sessions, direct access to me and the AI Powered Intelligence Hub. It's the home of Biolet M and A. If you want to learn more, visit mascience.com let's jump in. I'm your host Kisam Patel, Chief Scientist here at M and A Science. Today I'm joined by Birgita Elverson, former Unilever M and A leader, longtime operator across strategy and programmatic M and A, now a non Executive Director at Netlight. Alongside her is Lars Elverson, co founder of Netlight and a board advisor investor who's seen rollups from Idea Stage through execution. Plus he's a co founder and Chairman at Medino, the UK Online pharmacy. Today we're going to learn how experienced board members pressure test rollup acquisitions by preventing deal fever, right sizing diligence for volume and evaluating the people and culture risks that most models miss so you can stay buyer led from sourcing through integration and value creation. Brigitte, Lars, how are you guys doing today?

Very well.

Thanks for kind enough to host Live in Person in Verbier, Switzerland.

Thank you.

Thank you for making the trip. It wasn't a short one, was it?

It wasn't a short trip, but it's well worth it. I mean, this is little paradise over here. And I just realized on the side I can see the mountain and people actually skiing right down the slopes.

It's gorgeous today. And you've been out there?

I've been out there. I think you may.

Well done.

Did you both make it out on the mountain today?

Yeah, a little bit. Different disciplines. I did gates training with the other parents at school. And you've been climbing up the mountain?

Yeah, I did a bit of rendezvousing and some of the higher peaks are on there.

Wow. So that's your morning routine is just to hit the mountain and then I'm working on my slope skills. But I was pretty confident in most of the slopes here today. Much better than last time I was out here.

Well done.

Well done. You.

Can we kick things off a little

bit about both your backgrounds?

My background is I'm a Master of Science to start with. And then I founded a company during my university times and which is a consultancy company. And that is no M and A at all. It's been 100% organic and it's been growing all over Europe and a bit in Canada and about 2,000 consultants. And then since 2016, I'm not there operationally anymore. And since then I'm working with different private equity companies and also our own family office, co investing, due diligence and doing a lot in M and A.

Tell me a little bit more about the consultancy, because that's one thing you grew organically, but did you also do some acquisitions in that business?

No acquisitions. It's all 100% organic. It's ideologically forcefully non M and A. So it's a complete opposite to the rest. So that's why I've seen both sides of it.

How about your M and A experience? Where was your early exposure to M and A?

That started in 2016 when I started Boeing Heaven. Because I wanted to see the other side of the story, the other side of building companies. So that's why from 2016 started working together with all the big private equity companies that are in the business, just to learn from all of them, to see how do you do this in the best way.

So then you partner up with different private equity firms, see their strategies and

support, see them and help them as an expert and be with them on the deals. I worked with quite a few of them.

Brigitte.

I have a master of Science as well. I'm a mathematician. I have basically three big chunks in my professional career. First I spent a decade at McKinsey doing strategy, M and A and operations, big change and transformations. Then I spent a decade in the corporate world with Unilever. I worked across the globe, did change programs and I built a new business unit from scratch called Health and Wellbeing which is now doing tremendously well, I must say. So I wrote up that strategy, which was a buy and build strategy, leveraging a lot of what I had learned in my years at McKinsey and also leveraging a lot of what I learned about Unilever and the industry around us. Then I implemented that strategy, bought a half a dozen companies and put them together and then started my third chunk of my career which is the non executive chunk where I do investments. We run our family office together, so we invest and then I do advisory

and board roles, different backgrounds, family business. Move into the private equity side with a full on M and A exposure. We're getting one through consulting and then into the corporate side. Now you sort of find your common ground with a direct investments through a family office, then also advising as a board to different companies.

Yeah, we had a bit of a hedging strategy to begin with. Starting your own business is a little bit risky. So Lars did the entrepreneurial path with the high risk and high reward and I did the McKinsey and corporate path which was a little bit lower risk and lower reward but steady cash flow.

So a couple sidebars.

Birgitta, we did an interview about two years ago.

You haven't listened to it. Want to hear the full in depth

story about building a platform at Unilever,

all the nuances that went into it, then essentially deploying a roll up strategy from scratch. Highly recommend checking out Search Bigitta's name in Mascience. You'll probably find it pretty easily. And then you get both are married. If you haven't figured that out in this interview so far, how does that work? Everybody's just super curious. Do you end up talking about M and A more times than not? Is it sort of bucketed like how

when you look at that we're sort of co workers because we don't work most of the time. Sometimes we do it most of the time. We don't work on the same deals but we do the same type of work. So we get to bounce off things with each other instead of being alone. This type of work can be quite lonely. We're doing, you know, as co workers but on different deals.

We're each other's investment committees.

Yeah. If we're doing investments in the family, we have to take it by the ic which is the other half. Oh, interesting. So we have formal sessions where we do IC decisions.

You got to cross reference each other's work.

Cross reference and you have to present it to each other.

Let's take it from the top. Let's walk through your approach and reviewing diligence. Both of you obviously have advised on a ton of M and A deals and you've seen a lot of things go really well. You've seen a lot of things go bad.

First of all, I haven't talked to

a lot of board advisors in this podcast.

Talk to a lot of hands on operators.

You two have got a lot of peripheral view over deals. First I want to understand is what

is the real value of having board

advisors with M and A experience and how do they lend to value when it comes to M and A?

Basically most private equity companies their skill is in more in finance and structure and not in the exact line of business. They're trying to acquire things. So that's why they work with a lot of different advisors. So if they want to go in for roofing companies, they need somebody who knows roofing companies and if they want to go into buying consultancy companies, they need somebody who knows consultancy companies. So that's one part of it. The other part is that they also a lot of them like also to have professionals in actually the M and A process what to look out for and how do you see what deals are good and what deals are not good. And I would say also the third role that the OS is doing is that they also actually using advisors a lot of time to to make the sellers happy to sell. Sometimes there is a guarantee to vouch for this PE company and that they are nice and decent people because especially founders selling their business. They want to sell it to somebody who cares who are going to take care of their company.

It does make sense to have somebody from the industry who is able to provide a little bit of a sanity check because a lot of things can look good on paper but if you've been in the industry you might be able to look through and see things that might not be obvious when you come from somewhere else.

So operating experience, the fact that you've both been operators or in that part of the business. 2 the M& a experience. This is where sanity check fits in there as well. We've seen this movie play out before. And then the certainty to sellers. I'd like to understand that a little more.

Yeah.

Because I always imagine it's a CEO to CEO type of relationship. I could understand if it's a CEO like myself even trying to support an acquisition with deal room be the first acquisition. I can sound like I know a lot cause I don't know how many podcasts but they're like hey, how many deals have you done? It's like zero. Does that come in play where you sort of step in as a board advisor and saying hey, we're going to be involved. I'm going to be here to help out, make sure things go well.

Mostly when private equity companies do their first deal or their platform, if they bunch together a few deals and they start the first platform, private equity company often have a concept, an idea what they want to create and then they start looking for companies that fit into that. And when they find that companies, they create a platform with them. So to convince those first companies to be part of that first platform to be the bedrock of the new company, that's very important that you get the right companies there. That's normally we actually do the due diligence. There's where I can vouch that this PE company is sound and they have a record of treating other founders in a good way.

I think there's one thing to clarify too platform and add ons. So maybe people are new to the industry. Typically first investments or a couple investments or your platform setting up the bedrock and that sets up the strategy, often consolidation to add more businesses to it. Ideally you get involved pretty early in that formation of the platform.

A lot of times I've been involved and you also be involved in when it's only a concept. And then you start looking at deals together with the private equity companies potential kind of targets and then you miss some targets and you win some targets and then eventually you have the platform and then you can start to roll up from there.

So very early, let's talk diligence. I feel like that's such a big part of doing M and A.

How.

How does board advisors add value when it comes to doing diligence on deals

As a board advisor or as a board member or the chair or whatever role you have, your work is very long term in a sense. When you get the DD report in front of you, it's usually too late to do anything about that specific due diligence. What you can do is that you can influence future due diligences by making sure that people know that what's important to look for. In that sense, it's sort of a long term quality assurance work that you do when you're on the board. When it comes to the specific due diligence, most of the time you're only involved when it's all done and dusted, in a sense, and then it's a yes or a no. I actually think a lot about a former McKinsey colleague of mine, a Norwegian guy, who was always very specific in the way he worked with the teams. So when he got a report or when the team had done some work first, he would figure out if it met the bar. Is this good enough? Does it answer all the questions? And if it met the bar, he wouldn't have any improvement ideas. He wouldn't try to change anything in the report, he would just boost the team so that they could do the best work possible. But if it didn't meet the bar, that's when he got in and really worked with a team and tried to make it better. That's a little bit what it's like to be a board member. But when it doesn't meet the bar or when it's not a good enough deal, then the only thing you can do is say no. But you only have so many bullets to say no because you can't keep stopping the team from doing what they feel is the right thing. So you have to be very careful to push the no button in that case.

That's interesting. So it sounds like as a board advisor you're getting involved pretty early. And then a lot of this operational part you're not involved with.

You're getting back involved when it's a

go, no go decision. And that's when you can push back on this thesis and poke holes.

When you start the platform, that's when you're very early engaged and that's when you can set the foundation. What are we looking for? What type of companies? And then you can measure the type of companies you find towards those targets. And then when you have the platform and you're doing a lot of add ons acquisitions, what you try to do is that you try to set up a framework before and that's where the board advices and the board is very involved to set up this framework. And then the management go out looking to fulfill that framework. And then you as a board member normally have a, you have a troika also is involved a little Bit early with the chairman and the private equity company and the management. Very early, before the board formally gets involved. But when the board gets involved, you can make a decision whether you should do this acquisition from the framework. If you say no to deal, the best opportunity is to say that it doesn't fulfill the framework we have agreed upon together. You can't really come there and say no, I don't really feel like this. You have to back it up by going back to the fundamentals.

Can we roleplay this out? Can we make up a roll up strategy here? What would be a fun one? Let's pick on the vet industry. That's an easy one. Animal hospitals.

Yeah.

If I come up with an idea that I studied the market and I found Switzerland to be very fragmented with animal hospitals and regional area, we can look at Germany and some of the other surrounding areas. I build a thesis and obviously I should have done some homework to understand the demographics, what the market opportunities look like, build some pipeline. I'm sure you'd want to see that. I've identified some targets, talked to some early conversation of folks that seem pretty actionable, that we could get them to an LOI on some pretty reasonable terms. I would package this up into investment thesis and I would pitch this private equity firm and they're probably like, you should go talk to Lars and Vergita because they've got a ton of experience in this space and they're our operating partners. You have a relationship there, right? I'm talking to you about my idea. Is that usually how it pans out?

Or even earlier. So it's normally somebody at the PE company saying like, oh, I've been thinking about this veterinary. We're doing a roll up in the veterinary space.

So sometimes a PE firm could actually ideate this thesis and then they could plug me in as an operator.

100%, I would say. Most deals I do, the PE firms have the is driving the working thesis and then they put together a team, then they recruit the operator and then recruit advisors and then they start building the story.

The private equity firm could develop this thesis and approach you to validate that thesis.

Yes.

What does that conversation look like? What are the key elements and things that make it valuable?

Yeah. To be honest. So we say we're in pretty early, but what happens before we get in is that when the private equity firm is raising a fund, they have a thesis already then. And at that point the industry advisors or the industry experts are not involved so much. They might have talked loosely. They basically come in With a framework of the type of industries that they want to roll up. And then they start having ideas about exactly what industries they should be getting into. And they say, ah, veterinary industry, whatever. And then they start looking who in my network knows something about this space? And then they try to find the right experts, they involve them, they figure out who knows something and who is actually excited about the idea and they validate it together with them. And I would say most of the time, because people in private equity are typically quite smart and they've looked into market fundamentals. So I would say most of the time it does get validated. You start working together and look at maybe a long list of companies that they have identified and you as an expert can weigh in on what constitutes good performance or high performing companies in the space. What should we be looking for if we want to put together a platform? What areas make sense for integration between companies? For example, what do you want to keep separate? What is the overall logic of the platform in this space and how should we evaluate them? I would say those are some of the really early conversations that you would have.

It also depends a little bit on the type of private equity companies. So they are all different. What I've learned during the years is that they're all very, very different. You think that private equity companies are the same, but they're very, very different. So some smaller ones they can just come and then they have 20 different ideas and then they talk to different experts. Then you know, one of them starts working. So a lot of time they work on very many different platform hypothesis and then together with this to do maybe raise fundraising at the same time. So it's. So that's some of the smaller one, the larger one have more structured approach because they have more internal experts and so on. It's all very, very dependent.

So some can kind of a bunch of ideas that they're starting off with. Some could actually have that dialed in more and have more of a structured approach. It sounds like the common element when they bring this to you as an experienced operating partner is that you help them shape it into a framework. And in that framework is a clarity on what good companies to buy looks like. And then thinking through integration as a broader strategy as they execute this roll up then also their specific model to evaluate these businesses. Part of acquisitions.

Yeah. And also we look a lot of what's the potential targets of this product in the end?

Target identification.

Yeah. So where it's going to basically be sold onto who would be interested in this platform when we Are done with it.

Oh, so exit, exit.

So you go through a lot of exit to who are potential targets that will take over this business and take next level. The private equity world is very segmented. You have smaller and then when you're down that platform where a larger one takes over and take another five year and then a larger one after that. It's like the ecosystem of the ocean. Letting bigger fish take the smaller fish.

I've seen that and running deal room for about 14 years. I've seen that. Where a rollup gets acquired after a number of years and then you get acquired by another rollup and just see them beef up them and a strategy every time.

Yeah. And you just have to start somewhere. So I have had the opportunity a lot of times to take it the first steps to do the first both building the platform and both doing the first integration and roll ups to fair size companies.

So we helped shape this idea and start getting clarity. And it sounds like the first thing, it sounds like all these pieces come together and then once you get agreement on these areas, is it through conversations like do you have to do a lot of documentation around this? Does a private equity firm take ownership of that? What does that look like before we get to starting to execute this plan?

Typically the private equity firm have very. They're very close to the overall M and A work that happens throughout this rollup. They take a lot of ownership over material, the money over banks, over due diligences and everything. And then they work differently as you build your platform. And some of them stay in very strong control of M and A even after they have started building the platform. And then others they are more keen to make it more self sufficient. And then they build up the M and A capability inside the platform so it nurtures itself. Then they typically stay pretty close and do a lot of quality assurance in the due diligences.

I've seen that difference firsthand. Where private equity pushes all the M and A activity in house versus building that capability at that platform company. Regardless, you would stay on as this board advisor and they may have identified or already early on identified an operating management team.

Yeah.

And then you work pretty closely with that management team.

We often recruit the management team or part of the recruitment process.

So that could be part of it too. So you can add value by helping recruit the management team for this.

Absolutely. All senior roles are normally going through

us and then they start buying these companies.

Yeah.

What about some of the points of making go no go decisions? I know. Lars, at one point you mentioned that you look at 50, 60 companies a year, what are your top things that you're going to try to identify?

First of all, I try to see that it's within the framework we have decided. If it's not in the framework, I point it out and that often leads to stop. Especially if we said that we're looking for a certain size or certain turnover because it's quite difficult to find targets as you all know. You start looking for smaller and smaller companies and they say hey, we shouldn't look for this small size companies because it's too complicated to integrate. We have agreed on that. And that's normally a quite hard stop when normally the management take a bit of a breather, a break and they redo and look at the pipeline again and maybe do a clean out to go back to the basics who you're looking for. So that's the first one. The other big no is that when you feel that the operating management company don't have a good connection with the people on the other acquiring companies, are the founders going to stay or are they going to go if they don't really know that if it's not really structured, it's a people business. So I always try to pressure more on the people. Do they really understand why they want to sell this or take the next step? I'm looking very much at the human side of things.

So our veterinarian roll up here, we'd end up with a framework that says hey, we are looking for business in a specific region. Maybe there's a revenue range, maybe there are some other attributes. I don't know what the metric is. Are there like hospitals have beds?

No, no. But it's quite interesting because I looked at veterinaries actually the thing with the veterinary business is that it extreme in most cases extremely fragmented. And it's normally you have your village vet here in our village we have our vet, everybody knows her and it's one lady and she has a few employees. So if you're rolling up vets then you can also have more the hospitals. But it's a whole ecosystem so you have to start with a small one to the big one. So when you're looking at doing a sizable veterinary rollout, you look at maybe acquiring 100 companies at least. I would say you need a solid pipeline and you need a solid framework and how it should work not to spend too much time and money on due diligence because then it won't work. And then it's try to be really diligent on following your roadmap and your

structures, we got real really quickly on their investment thesis here. Where do things go sideways? I don't want to play this where it's easier said than done. Yes, we can identify targets, but where do you see? Because people, there's good deals to do and bad deals. And obviously in the beginning it's critical to really make sure you're executing on some good deals. But when you see companies or teams veering off that criteria, like what are the drivers of them going off course and maybe doing the deals that they shouldn't be doing.

If you're hired to do deals, it's very exciting to do deals, as Lars said. I mean, it's not very easy to find companies in a lot of these spaces. That's why you do roll ups. Because the industry is fragmented, it's maybe not very mature. It's not very clear exactly who would be acquiring who. If it were easy, there wouldn't be an opportunity there. So it is hard. And if you're hired to basically do deals, you are going to try to do everything you can to find good deals. Nobody's forcing you to take a step back and sort of relook at the framework and the strategy and the criteria. It's very easy that you sort of nudge your way out of that. It's a little bit like if you're using a shape, just like when you were in kindergarten and you wanted to make certain shapes. If you have like one master shape and you keep coming back to it, all of your shapes are going to be roughly the same. But if you take the next shape and you use it for the third shape, and then you take the third shape and use it for the fourth shape, going to get further and further away unconsciously from where you were actually heading to begin with. So it's a very natural and very human thing to do. And that's when it's good to just be able to take a step back and be like, okay, is this really what we were looking for? Path to get to specifically this company might be super clear. But when you look at where you ended up, where the end was, you can see that it wasn't where we went set out to go.

And I would say that's why it's so important to have a very long target list. It's always a problem when you only have two or three targets and it's like you need to take this one because otherwise it will disappear. So it's super important that you work with a long, long Long pipeline. It should be absolutely massive pipeline because then you know, the whole organization will automatically weed out the bad ones and keep the good ones.

It's easy for management teams to get deal happy.

Very easy.

Part of the role is acting like parents and reel them back in, share them some life lessons, hope they listen.

The problem is also that the private equity companies are also very deal happy. That's the double problem. That's also how they earn their money. So everybody's getting incentivized by doing deals. And that's why it's quite hard to sometimes manage that urgent. And the way to manage it, I found, is to have super long target list.

Yeah. Expand on your target list.

Yeah.

It's much easier to say no if you by saying no are saying yes to something else or the opportunity to do something else. But if people feel like there's no opportunity to do something else, they're going to fight you.

So if you have a list of 10 companies versus 50, there's just probability you're going to have a more compelling yes out of the 50 versus reality

is more either two companies or 50. So a lot of times the deal flow is way too small and that's creating an enormous problem. While all the time when I've been in companies where I have a very long pipeline, it's been a lot easier and everybody been happier.

I find that this is often because of the way you look at your criteria. You have this framework and you have your strategy and that leads to a set of criteria. And what often happens is that you use more strict criteria than you need to create your long list. That makes long list very short in a sense. So what I try to do is always to be a bit more lenient on the initial criteria. There are some that are very important, but we can't sit here and say exactly what the company is going to look like. So we need to allow for a lot of degrees of freedom in terms of how the company looks that meet these three or four really important criteria. And if you do it like that, you allow for a very long list that you then can investigate and you can have your funnel continue to be a funnel rather than a tunnel. Because when you have a tunnel, that's when you feel like you have scarcity and that's when you feel like you have must win deals. And that's when you start making the wrong decisions.

How do you expand the pipeline?

How do you expand it? You go in the right market.

That's one fundamentally going no.

To be honest, the question Here is why there's so many roll ups in Sweden is because all public records are public. All records are public. So you can search any company in Sweden and we're in the Nordics and you get all the turnovers and all the financial data and everything.

Why even all the private companies?

Yeah, there is no private. There's no private in private companies. While if you go to Switzerland or Germany, it's much more secretive. It's super more difficult to make the rollups in Germany than in the Nordics. If you would say one thing to the politicians, if they want to have a moving market with the best of the best, they should just make it more transparent. As always, if you have a transparent market, more deals will happen and the cost for every deal go down. Also because everything is public knowledge.

That makes sense. It'd be nice if it was all clear. I actually worked in financial industries in the US and it's all public too. Our fdic. You post all the financials for every bank in the us. It was just so easy to do deals because you could model everything out, have first meeting, be pretty productive and put a valuation on the business and you see if you can get a deal done.

And now with AI agents, it's a pretty level field because it's not that complicated to do your own agents for just searching everything. Basically.

I was just saying there's a lot of private company data is sort of the new revolution that's popping up that could be another element. So regardless, find your avenue, expand your pipeline. That's going to help with a lot of these things. When you looked at those three or four must have criteria. Brigitte, what are those on our veterinarian roll up?

Typically you should try to find your right size of the company because it's very difficult in my experience to mix companies that have super different sizes. You probably have something about profitability, you probably have something about what type of services that they provide. Those are basically it. What business are they in, how big are they, what kind of profitability? Most of the time those three are enough to make a long list and then you need to dig into them to figure out what makes sense to put together in your platform.

Sorry, how's the clock?

Yeah, got real.

Time is money.

There we go. Here we go. The reminder, the size the business is actually a good point because the business could range a little bit within that realm. What we talk about veterinarian and then profitability is other key thing. I'm in first board role myself as of maybe three or so Months ago. In terms of choosing what are the political battles that you want to play in and just step out of, how do you decide that when it comes to working with these companies, if there's areas where you just kind of know, like, you don't agree with the way they're operating things, but you have to let it be versus, hey, I got to get aggressive and vocal here. How do you decipher that and what typically are those parameters?

The most important rule is to save your silver bullets. So if you agree on something in general, but maybe you have some minor input or there are other things that you want to happen, or maybe you want to tweak it a little bit, I would say just leave it, because nobody's going to be happy with that type of input. And the only thing you do is that you're wasting one of your silver bullets. So I think back to my McKinsey colleague who was like, if it's good enough, boost the team, because the team needs to have positive experience of working with you as well. And a lot of what you do is to really motivate the team and give them energy, help push them in the right direction. If you're not going to stop something, then I would just say celebrate and be very positive and boost everybody's energy. And then you have those few occasions where you say, this is important enough to actually take a stance, and that's where you put your foot down and you become a little bit cumbersome. And they really have to be linked to strategy. So if we have one strategy and we're now going to take an action that is moving us in the opposite direction, that's when it's also not your point of view that this is wrong. This is something that you can link back to a decision that's already been made. And your role as a board member is to safeguard a company. And you have a duty to basically make sure that the decisions you're making are consistent. So usually it comes down to inconsistencies with previous decisions that you've made, usually strategics.

So don't nitpick. Use the bullet when you have to. Have you ever used a bullet and killed a deal?

Yeah.

Can you tell me about deals you've killed with a bullet?

For me, it was the size, the most recent one. They were acquiring two small companies. And then we agreed that we shouldn't have this size of companies. And they, after a bit of discussion, they said, okay, yeah, we agree, we agree to that. So then we just killed the deal.

And it goes back to your point of holding them accountable on the criteria that you originally built in the framework.

Yeah. And most of the time, because it happens, it's the wrong type of technology, or it's the wrong geography, or it's the wrong size, or it's the wrong profitability. It is one of those criteria. And what I think is important to be open for is that sometimes you learn from the targets that you identify. Sometimes they are a sign that your strategy was maybe not so thought through. So in all those occasions, I try to leave an opening and be like, actually, our strategy says this is not what we should do. Is the strategy wrong? But if the strategy is wrong, then we should rework the strategy. We can't just push for this deal and leave the strategy as is. So it's one or the other.

I mean, so it's very much not about. You're not killing the deal. You can't do that. It's a dialogue. You're just there as an advisor. By pointing out inconsistencies, you make them come to that conclusion themselves. The other thing that's also quite important here is I know it's slightly different in the us, but in Europe, it's the board that hire and fires the CEO and that's the ultimate power. So that's what the board is doing. That's the main job. And it's a hire and fire. So you don't really waste your silver bullet. But if you have a CEO that doesn't understand any of your hints of the whole board, if everybody says something and it doesn't happen, then eventually they will be changed.

A lot of influence there.

Yes. If it doesn't work out for a while, then they change the CEO.

Can I pull a thread on one of the things you mentioned earlier? Because you mentioned making sure the deal fits the framework criteria. He also mentioned the management team in terms of things that can go wrong with the deal if they don't know if the founders are staying, leaving. And I think there's the people element is something worth chatting about. But since that's like one of the main reasons why these deals go sideways, can we talk a little bit more about that? Like, what does that look like in terms of part of the diligence to make sure that there's some alignment?

The traditional ways do that during due diligence and have a lot of contracts to say that people have to stay. I find that that only captures part of it. What I really like to focus more on is the people side. Do they really want to, you know, where are they in life? Why are they at this point right now is because they want to go into retirement or do they have super much energy and want to take this to the next level? It's very important that you feel that. And sometimes not all sellers are 100% transparent and honest about that. I try always to pick a bit on the story and see if my management really try to puncture that story and see if it's working or not.

And sometimes, even if people are truthful, it's very difficult as an owner to realize what life is going to be like after you're acquired. A lot of the time. I have seen founders who are super keen to continue. They got loads of energy and they're like, yeah, I'm going to stay. And they sign all of these contracts. And then when reality hits and they're suddenly a part of a platform and they have a different type of owner, they are not the owner themselves. They can't take all the shots anymore. Reality hits and it turns out this is not what they want to do. And then they exit. Even though they had all the greatest intentions and figuring out who really understands what they're signing up for and who might have a little bit of a rose tinted view of what life is going to be like after the acquisition, that's a really important part of what you do when you've been in the industry for a while and when you've done a number of deals and integrations.

So coming back to the framework there, it's basically, you might have a new frame, most of the founders should stay, but we also have the options of people not staying and then we find a substitute for it. But then you have to go back to how many of these can we have? And is everybody honest in this process?

Would that change your valuation approach?

I wouldn't say necessary. If the process is open and you speak to each other in an open way, you get a much better result. The only time it's been really problematic is when it's not been open. Then it's quite nightmarish for everybody involved.

Things that change the valuation approach are. I often see founders who don't have realistic salaries. For example, they haven't taken the type of salary they would have if they were on the open market. And when you buy small companies, all those salaries can clearly influence the value of the company. And if you have to replace somebody who has come in as a founder with an externally hired CEO, your costs might shoot through the roof. And maybe you need more people to face somebody who has been there from the start. In that sense, figuring out the cost base and the impact of founders leaving is going to be quite important for the valuation.

This is really interesting. I feel like the numbers are pretty clear. I'm a numbers person. I can get aligned around it and get a sense of the business. Seems good on paper versus not this people element gets pretty interesting. A lot of deals I looked at last year, I wasn't really that excited about the management team, but seems like they're doing pretty good. The numbers speak for themselves. They're producing some revenue. I want to learn more about that of how do you get really better at the people identification? Because it sounds like and I haven't had that yet where do a deal and maybe you have examples of it where the numbers made sense but then the deal didn't work out because the people didn't align well. And like should that be a must have that you're really excited about the people that you're bringing into the organization?

It depends on what you're planning to do with the company. It's very nice when you have people excited about coming on board. Obviously, especially if you're in a people based business, you can have huge negative effects if you have an adverse reaction to the deal. That's a real risk you need to take into consideration when it comes to whether the management, the team or the founders stay or not. It depends on your approach. And I've done both. I've done a roll up where we exchanged all the CEOs as soon as the company came on board and that was part of the plan and it was all fine and it worked really well. And I've also done another where it was more important to keep the entrepreneurial spirit and then you wanted the founders to stay on in the individual companies. The important thing is to plan for the outcome you want because you're going to approach it differently. You're going to have different degree of integration costs, you're going to have a different impact on management costs and you're going to have a different risk level. A lot of the founders are really great salespeople and if they disappear, you have a big risk on the customer side, for example. All of those things you need to take into account. But I wouldn't say there's a right or a wrong. It's more need to work with a consistent approach and plan for what you're going to do.

Do you have an example of a deal you've worked on where numbers looked really good but Then it fell apart because of the people.

Quite a few of these deals and the worst one is the one that falls apart after you acquire them. Quite a few of these. Unfortunately, in some of the occasions I've been advising quite heavily against acquiring these companies, but the urge to do the deal has been stronger. That's the concept of when you're doing rollups. Basically you buy so many companies that some of them will fail and most of them fail because of people.

Would you say that's the biggest risk in doing consolidation play?

I would say two things. One is market. Because what we have seen during the last year is always you suddenly have a hyped market and then you not have a hyped market. So if you start doing a roll up now in AI in two years time, you might sit here and say that was the stupidest ever and doesn't matter if people are good or bad. So unfortunately the market is having a great effect on your success, which is quite sad because you can't really do much about it. And the other one is, I would say people, people, they have not been truthful in their assumptions before or you start finding stuff.

Sometimes people say that you can buy in the down market and then you sell in the up market. Typically the value expectations are pretty high in the down market. So that's actually a really, really difficult thing to do. And the bad market is 80% going to be at a disadvantage to you. And on the people side, what I've seen a lot is that it's very difficult for founders to really articulate what they're doing and the value they're bringing. So if you're going to replace them, you can't trust them to write a job description, for example, for their successor because they've got no clue. I've seen it so many times, especially if you've been in the company since it started, you're one of the founders and you've been building it up. It's extremely difficult for people to articulate exactly what their role entails. And then when you try to hand over to an externally recruited CEO or if it's somebody who is internally recruited even, there is a lot of things that are going to fall between the cracks. It's going to be super difficult.

How do you crack the code on this?

I can see how you can be

very involved with hiring the management team that's going to execute the consolidation play and then their targets that they're acquiring you probably aren't as closely involved. How do you set this up? What's your approach to accessing the people. Teach me how to crack the code here.

Choose your management team very carefully and then you coach your management team or you're available for them to bounce things with you as a sounding board.

You gotta do really good at making sure you assess that there's a good fit for this management team that's gonna execute on this thesis. And then you can coach them along with way you identified with them as being good players, that they continue that in the targets that they acquire.

Teach me how, how to find the

good management team so how do I

assess them and make sure they're true? Because everybody interviews really well.

No, but it's nightmare. And then it's coming back to the fire and higher obligations of the board. Both of us been to platforms where we actually have changed the management team quite a few times before we find the right setup.

Sometimes there's a trial and error to this.

Yes, 100%.

But this is also why if you see people's careers, this is why you see them follow each other. You have people that work together and then you see them follow each other from company to company and from job to job. Because once you know you can work with somebody, you don't want to let them go. Obviously if you have prior experience of somebody in your management, that's fantastic thing that's not always possible. But what I see is often going wrong when you have the wrong management is that they become. They isolate themselves. If you have management that has good outreach to the board and they leverage the different board members, they reach out proactively, they ask for advice. Typically, those management teams tend to do quite well even if they don't know everything to begin with. At least they get to leverage everybody on the board and their strengths and that's going to help them. And they're also going to be much more in the same boat as the board and you're going to have a much better understanding between each other to

make life a little bit even more complicated. Quite often management team reach out to private equity companies and say like, hey, we're a management team, we want to roll up this business. And that obviously gives you a head start. Often it's underestimated how difficult it is to find a good management team to do a complete new business where they haven't worked together before. You're putting to bed sort of a boy band and then you're trying to infuse them with the enthusiasm for this specific thing that you as a private equity company has already thought out. For them that they should be enthusiastic about. There's a lot of things that can go wrong when you start with an external management team, but that's how it often is done.

What are the standout traits for a killer management team?

It's a combination of both doing M and A and running the business. That's normally where the big problem is that a lot of people are either or and often they're brought into this type of roll ups by being very good at M and A, but then they forget about the core business. So you have to mitigate that. So that often means that you have a dual CEO. One take more care of the operations of the existing business and one focus more on the M and A side.

What I also often consider is that it is very hard to be management in a roll up, if I'm honest. Because if you're there from the beginning, it's a little bit like being an entrepreneur starting your own company. And you need to take quite a big risk. Of course you're going to get paid. But if you're on a cor career journey or whatever and you jump into this unproven concept, it's a big risk that you're taking career wise. So you need to be a little bit wild to go for it. And you really need to believe in this project. And in the beginning it's a lot about charming the companies that you want to get on board as your first platform. And that takes a certain personality type. But then as your business is growing, you also need to build a proper business out of it. So it's almost like being a founder in an entrepreneurial company. It's just that the journey to maturity is so much faster. So it's actually very difficult for you to mature along with a company. You almost need to have that kind of quality or that capability to begin with to run something which is more of a corporate. Now these roll ups are rarely corporates like the big multinationals we see in the world. But you still need to be able to build a proper company with the right processes, the right structures and deal with things that large companies deal with. And to be able to do that while you are that little bit crazy and very charming person who's willing to jump on, for example, as a CEO in something which is completely unproven, that must be so hard. I've seen very few people who are able to do that.

That's an interesting take. It is truly a transformation to go from a founder organic built business to scaling through acquisitions.

If you look at a typical PE journey, you start with zero or maybe the first platform is 100 people and then within three years you'd be maybe 3,000. A very quick journey. So in the beginning you need to charm people and then quite quickly you have to go into the financial market to get the right bonds and everything. You have to be a quite capable person.

Can I ask you about integration? And the reason I want to ask is when I had my last role working with Deal Room, about two thirds of our customers were a rollup. And the big thing I've noticed over the past five years was private equity buyers were digging more into in their diligence of how well these roll ups are integrated and that when they do their diligence and find out things were as nicely packaged and integrated, that was then discounted on valuation. There's a lot more scrutiny around how well these platforms are actually integrated. Is that like the same thing that you're seeing as well? How do you sort of circumvent that as a.

Do you mean when somebody's looking to buy part of the next journey?

When we look at the cycle right, private equity buys the next one. The next one. So now we see that as like there's a deeper diligence in looking into how well that company's integrated. And then all of a sudden it turns into, well, here's a backlog. You don't have a consolidated erp. All these things are fragmented systems. We're now going to discount that valuation because we see a backlog of integration work to do. It seems like that was the big talk when I talked to our customers was like a lot more criticality about how well the companies are actually integrated. Working backwards now it's like, how do you circumvent that? So you can.

First of all, it's not surprising because if you are buying a rollup, you're probably buying more than one roll up. And if they're all poorly integrated, you have an exponential complexity in there and you need to do all the hard work. And integration is so hard. So it's a real value add if the rollup that you are acquiring is already integrated. So not very strange at all.

All right, that's bad practice. What's best practice?

When you look at integration, you can choose what to integrate and what not to integrate and doing everything semi integrated is probably the worst thing to do. But I would prefer, and I would recommend that you rather choose your integration areas and where you integrate, you do it 100% and then there might be other areas that are zero integrated which is fine at least for a while. Depends on what you're going to do with the company later.

This is like done pretty early. When we talk about the framework earlier that you're starting to think about a broad strategy of how you're going to integrate the businesses acquire.

That's part of the sales pitch for companies you're acquiring. You have to tell them how you want to integrate them.

There's probably different views whether they're fully integrated. Partially integrate like you integrate the backend systems accounting, hr. Give them autonomy to run the front end like our local veterinarian here where they can focus on the customers and stuff. Maybe they don't like the back end part. Non integration is the other one which

also I mean it's working. So my take with this it's different trends. Sometimes it's very important. Everything is super integrated. Next phase should be semi integrated and sometimes it shouldn't be integrated at all. I don't really like to see it as value. You know how much that's going to decrease the value of the target. Depends so much what people are looking for at that moment. There's quite a few really large roll up cases where you basically buy anything under the sun and have no thoughts about and that integrates zero and they're doing great. Just doing a multiple arbitrage and everybody's happy. The whole thing is that a big pool of things is low risk than a small company.

Is that still a thing? I thought that was going away. If there are some of the bigger name private equity firms I've talked to that are now you got to really have synergies and you can't just.

That's what I mean with trending. So as you say that trend is not on right now but who knows in five years is that going to be trending or not? I would say right now over the last five years the trend has been semi integrated and my feeling is that going to more and more integrated again. But you have to remember it used to be a lot more integrated. I was a trend before that circle.

Interesting.

I mean the 90s was very much integration. It was a lot of backend synergies. It's been swinging the other way as you're saying and now it's maybe swinging a little bit back. Clearly there are areas that are easier and more value adding to integrate than others. Finance and HR is typically quite easy. In my previous job when I was acquiring supplement legal and regulatory is really important as you're growing. But if you're A young entrepreneur driven business, you typically don't have it. So you're very happy if somebody else can take care of that for you. And a lot of times marketing and sales are what people really safeguard and sometimes branding because it's kind of their home and it's what's in their identity. So a lot of times those are more risky, maybe less value adding.

A lot of times they also gone away from thinking that you're going to have a lot of synergies in your acquisition is most of the time there's very low synergies. There are some depending on the roll up you do, you can find synergies but in general they're quite overrated. So if you can just stay on the same profit margin as you did with a founder, that's probably going to be where you're going to end up in a good day.

And if your largest customer is not 50% of your turnover but 10, and that obviously is a less risky business to acquire in the next round.

There's some varying schools of thought here. This is interesting. There's one fundamental, there's evaluation, arbitrage. The bigger you get, better your multiplier is going to get. There's the other element where if you're buying healthy businesses, they'll keep growing organically, they have low customer churn and they're continuing growth and strong management. A little bit of if on the synergies, if you can really predict and count on them. It sounds like there's a lot of it depends on. There's no clear cut answer on how you should approach it. Integration really depends.

You need to have a plan. When you start the roll up, you need to have decided what level of integration should we do? What do we think the market want? When we going to hand this baby over to somebody else?

It's part of your story, your exit story.

Yeah. And you have to be a straight red line through it to be able to follow it.

There's a story that reads out to everybody. It reads out to your current team that you're executing, it reads out to the target company and then your potential company you're going to sell to and that it's got a line and that could be of like, hey, we are going to fully integrate. That's how we're going to lock all the synergy, central distribution, blah blah, blah, economies of scale. Or we're giving operators autonomy and we're supporting them and helping them focus on their core strength areas.

I'm doing both right now. I'm not Saying one is right and one is wrong.

Yeah, there's no right or wrong. But it's really important that you're consistent and that you make up your mind in a sense because when you try to mix things within the same company or in the same roll up, that's where it gets really messy.

So what are the best, like what would you say the traits are the best platforms in the market today? They're consistent because just focus on real consistency across the board. That you got a really clear, concise, everything's aligned. Here's your strategy, here's your operating model, here's a framework that you're executing, how you're going to integrate and that story aligns all the way across the board.

Yeah, this strategy and operating model and the framework are all consistent with each other. That's actually not self evident all the time. It's actually something you need to work

on and then you come back to good to great. It's all about the flywheel, pushing the flywheel and get everything going. You should see a acceleration in all these parts.

I admire those who buy struggling companies and turn them around.

I do too.

They're really great ones. I haven't seen them among those. I've seen them where you buy really strong companies and you make them even better.

But that's also quite interesting. Different private equity companies have focus on different things. So some PE companies knows that they are. They're nice. So they are going to go for good. Companies that are great, do them even better. And some other private equity companies are more focused on distressed companies or and like to do a turnaround for them. It's a lot more brutal and it's not always pretty.

You're not always going to be popular, are you?

That's like the in between too. The companies that consolidate flatline companies because you can usually buy them at a pretty good multiplier and then.

Yeah, and then you can have arbitrage just making them bigger. That's the generational play. You buy a lot of plumbing companies or then you buy a hundred of those different ones. Then you come back to integration and say like oh, they need to have a CRM. And they're like why do they have a CRM? So everything is in the founder's head in that local village because he knows the hundred people that buys from him and it's not that from another village going to come here. There is no synergies in CRM. Just as an example of things that you can discuss if you should integrate or not. So a Lot of minimum integration I've seen is that you basically every month send in like the key 10 key metrics and that's it. That's the only integration. And you keep your name and everything.

Got to dial it in and make sure it's interesting. I guess ultimately your true validation is at the end when you exit. Maybe that's a good area for us to talk a little bit about. Is like really setting up these companies for a successful exit and is there anything in that area that are key areas that you as an advisor would really help to frame these companies for an exit?

There is a structural problem with funds because they have a specific length when they need to sell their asset and that all often get in the way of doing good deals. My recommendation would be to be more opportunistic when there is a good valuation in the market. Sell. I got it from a super successful investor and he said you always should sell in an upward market where the buyer can imagine what's going to happen in the future. Too many people try to fit the peak to sell at the absolute top. But if you do that you're not going to get the top dollar and it's really difficult to do it. So it's better to sell in the up market than to try selling the down market. It's very difficult if you take a cautious decision. If you get a good offers in the up market and you didn't take them, then you also have to realize that you're going to be sitting on this asset three to five years more than you might have bought in the beginning. So my recommendation was sell early. If there is a good market, sell early.

How do you think that through? I feel like there's only one bottom line metric and that's your irr.

Yeah. And that's the problem because then they sit and look at the IRR and the one I was like oh.

They're like I want more, I want more.

I can have two more years of. And then goes two more years and you theoretically yeah. And theoretically you had a good irr but there's no buyer. Then you have three or five years of downturn and then you have to sell it because that's maximum length of your fund.

They hold too long.

Then you get into continuation funds and all the fund anyway I've been to all of them and it's a nightmare.

Isn't that what that market's like now? I feel like we have big write up but 2021 was our fabled year where known some folks that did Some deals in that year and it's like, well, how are you going to make out of it? I think there was some kind of assumption that all these companies are going to come for sale and they're going to have to come to realization that there's a valuation correction. But people don't want to take a down round.

No, no. So that's why people are getting creative. They come up with continuation funds and all kinds of stuff.

That's what they say. Private equity right now is the longest hold period they've ever had in history.

Yeah. And it's a nightmare. They can't reach raise the next fund either. So it's a really.

Everybody's just holding their breath and waiting for this to turn.

But a lot of people were also thinking, oh, now they have to sell but nobody has to sell really because they have the money. But yeah, I'm talking about zombie funds and all kind of stuff. There's a lot of things going on.

What's your view when you see these different private equity funds? What are their target irr that they're after? Does that range quite a bit. And how do they introduce that to you?

Hey, this is talk about that.

To be honest.

No, they don't.

Most of them. The classic thing is to say we want to have 3x within 5 years.

That's the thing common, the most staple is 3x 5 years. Yeah, I've heard that before.

They don't want to X in two years.

That's the problem.

That's the big mental problem.

You could have bought something and then all of a sudden there's some strategic or public company that comes in, they give you a good offer shortly after but you're like no, because then we got to figure out how to reinvest that money again.

Exactly. No. And they're not allowed. If they sell it, they have to hand out the cash to the owner. Yeah. Give it back. And then they don't get the 2% on that.

They don't get the 2% on the people. They don't get the continued management. They use performance.

Yeah. But the continued is often bigger.

So having the right balance between being near sighted and long term thinking, it's super difficult.

Super difficult. But I mean there was a lot of deals being done in 1718 and then had an opportunity to sell 21 but they didn't sell because they were like no, let's hold it until 23 because then our IRI is going to be absolutely amazing. Then 23 happens and there's nothing. And then they realize 24, 25. So now we have to close the fund. What should we do? And that's when the continuation funds and all different types of vehicles come up.

Those are my advisors on this veterinarian. If you see a good offer, you should probably take it.

Yeah. If you don't earn Evergreen, if you're an Evergreen, that's fine. Then you shouldn't be worried about it.

Then you can play long term.

Yeah. And then you can say they're going to hold it for 100 years anyways. It doesn't matter. But if you think in a five year cycle and you get a good thing after three years, you should probably take it.

When you have your family office investment approach, you probably look at it very differently than a typical fund. Like you're not looking at a specific term, you're looking each individual investment.

Our investments that we do are more of an evergreen basis.

Do you still think about IRR the same way?

No.

How do you think about it?

I find it very, very hard to evaluate things that you haven't sold. I know the industry do it all the time, but the NAV is super difficult to set and the novice, a lot of this when I've been selling it, they end up selling it for lower than nav. And I was like, why did we even do it in the beginning? I understand you need it in funds, but we don't need to have that on a quarterly basis.

You'd be great investors to have anytime we can work on the deal together.

But to be honest, I think a lot of, I mean we consider us more of as angel investors because we get heavily involved in the companies we invest in. I often recommend people to start business to work with angel investment or family office because they're much more long term, they don't have ending price.

Yeah. For us we've realized we're not very good at being passive investors in the number of lottery ticket companies because we get way too engaged. We want all of our companies to succeed. We would never be able to just say, oh, nine out of ten are going to fail. And that's fine because we make the rest on the 10th when we do direct investments. We only really do it with companies where we're engaging and then our time becomes a limiting factor. In a sense then we have chosen that we're going to make sure that those companies, each of them has to be big enough to really make a difference. We engage heavily. I would say in a few cases

it's like you're leaning in and you're almost like gauging on how much of an impact you can make. Leaning in gives you confidence in that investment.

Yeah.

Can we share some deal stories? Like a deal you're most proud of, a deal you're least proud of and amortized.

Geeta has been more success than me.

She's got to work on the bigger deals.

I never fall in love with the deals before I make them. I kind of fall in love with them after I make them. Because I feel very proud of almost all the companies that I've acquired or invested in. And it's like your babies and love one child more than the other. So I feel very strongly. And I keep promoting the businesses that I acquired for Unilever and I keep promoting them to my friends because I also only acquire or invest in companies where, you know, if they have a product, if I really like the product and I can use it. I gave away latest today, I gave away some liquid IV to a friend because that's one of my favorites from Unilever. And they're doing so well and I'm so proud of them. It's ridiculous. And I keep promoting my Neurosim, which is a neuromodulating device that the company Parasym has made. And I'm quite heavily engaged with them and I'm super proud of them. They're doing loads of great things, clinical studies, and they're very scientifically thorough. They're doing amazing work.

Most of my deals are smaller, so I tend to more fall in love with the process with a flywheel. So it's more like when the companies I work with, when they really get the speed up and get everything under control and you see the pacing, they start scaling. Yeah, that's when I get the most happy. Especially if they're doing a lot of acquisitions every year. One platform I did that platform was 27 companies we signed in the first day. But when you do that, it's a lot of stuff. And then.

Wait, how do you sign 27 companies in one day?

They have a big office with lots of lawyers.

They went and signed 27 companies?

Yes. In one day.

How many deals they end up doing? Over a year?

No, they're probably up to about 50 now. 50, 60 after that.

Yeah, they started and they just went right after it with all these proposed targets.

That was a deal that started and I started working with 2016. So it was, yeah, 18. And yeah, it's ongoing. And then, as I said, the market's very important and the market gone down a little bit and Was slower and then market's a bit quicker again. So it's. Yeah.

I gotta ask you both, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M. A?

I've seen people blatantly lying. That's the weirdest thing. And taking up future income as income. That happened today. And those kind of end run stuff.

Oh, some accounting lying. That's the worst kind of lying.

Yeah. It's a lot of accounting that's like criminal lying there.

Yeah.

Of course it's not that easy to prove it turned out in the end.

It's weird because it goes back to like, oh, it's a Q of E adjustment and it's not considered lying. It's just.

Yeah. And you had looked at the numbers and you have approved it. What's the problem? But I've seen a few of those, especially one big one and it's quite messy.

What was the premise of it? Was it just putting forward capital to.

Yeah, forward capital. And also took away some cost. Suddenly the numbers were a lot, lot, lot better than we. But then we had to basically disinvest in that specific company. So we dumped that company and continued with the rest of the platform.

You had to take a loss.

We had to take a loss.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

But that's the thing when you do roll ups. You have to realize that you're going to take loss.

What's your batting average that you should target?

I'm not sure. The average is trying to stay actually

batting average is probably a bad analogy. It shouldn't be that bad.

It's always some go better than they expected and some go worse. It's like you're looking for the median.

Is it like an 8020 that you miss on 20 and hit on 8?

No, I would say it's more 50. 5050 go better than 50 go worse.

Worse means.

But it doesn't mean that it go bust. That's very rare.

You just end up mediocre and not getting exactly what you wanted.

Yeah.

And to be honest, 5050 is enough most of the time statistically. Because even if they do worse, they typically don't go bust. But if they do better than you thought, it's going to be many times better. So that's going to outweigh the losses. So 5050 is a pretty good. And it's enough.

Okay, I won't be so critical. But Ricky, you got a crazy story.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if it's so crazy, but one of my favorite things in a is this company that I've followed for 10 years now. And initially it sparked my interest in supplements and I just followed it from afar and it was always too small for me to really do something big with it. But then now that I'm investing myself and I'm advising, I was able to reach out to this company, it's currently called ketoneiq, and they have this fantastic energy shot. And with that, the business has truly taken off as all the hockey sticks you don't see before it starts to become a juggernaut. And it usually takes a bunch of years. So I followed them for 10 years and now we are in touch and they are doing amazing things. That's a beautiful story. So maybe not crazy, but I love it.

You took a lighthearted take on that one. I like it. It's the persistence on the deal and eventually you got what you wanted. Yeah, this has been great. I want to thank both of you, Brigitte and Lars, for taking the time, having this conversation, sharing your perspective as a board advisor to all these M and A deals, and helping me become a better M and A scientist.

Thank you for taking the time. I'm coming all the way over here.

Those of you listening, I want to hear what you think about this interview because it's a different one. First time I think I've ever had a husband and wife duo on a podcast interview that we got to do way up here, high altitude mountains. Let me know what you think about the conversation. It's a little different take than we usually have. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I took off my privacy guard so it's easy to add me on there. Just put a little note so I know because I get a lot of spam. Mention that you listen to the podcast and I'll be happy to connect with you. Give me some feedback, give me some topic ideas I haven't covered and some criticism. I'll take it till next time. Here's to the deal.

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