Helping a 14-Company Portfolio Find Its Strategy

0:00Unternehmer/Gast So, my name's D. Ludlow. Uh we acquire companies >> What's your name? >> Uh D. Ludlow. >> D? >> Yeah. >> D. I'll go D. That work? Okay. >> Uh we acquire companies in the UK and Dubai. Um current revenue across the portfolio is about 35 million. Um the metric isn't so much want to get to a revenue metric. Want to try and create a minimum of around 50 million enterprise value. Um

0:23Alex >> Do you own all of them outright? >> No. So, it's it's varied. Um I think the problem is do we focus on build that uh double down on the companies we already have, grow the EBITDA that way, or do we keep acquiring and build the EBITDA through acquisition? >> How many do you have? >> 14. >> 14? >> Mhm. >> Are they similar? >> No, that's the thing. So, if we were to grow through acquisition, we'd have to try and create synergy down the line. Um yeah.

0:50>> Yeah. Um you're in you're you're in you're I said how many people uh work at HoldCo? >> Five. >> Yeah. So, you're you're in a very classic kind of PE no man's land. >> Mhm. >> Uh so, you have more companies than most funds would ever have. Um and you didn't pursue a synergistic strategy in order to accommodate volume. And so, on one extreme, you have like Constellation, which you're probably familiar with in Canada. It's like they only buy vertically integrated SaaS, and they go sub 3 million, and they just do 100 deals a year, right? And they just know their playbook.

1:25Alex Uh on the other side, you have traditional PE that would have a variety of different businesses they buy, you know, detail shop, and then a supplement company, and then a whatever. But, they only have 68 companies in a fund, and they have a decent, you know, decent HoldCo team to to to add value um to the company. And so, if I were in your position, first thing I would do is probably ask myself who do I want to be when I grow up in terms of what you want the actual day-to-day of the business to be, cuz you can hit 50 on either of those paths, right? And so, it's which of these do I feel more like more me? Like do I feel like I do have a couple of these businesses that you're like, I really understand these ones?

2:00Alex Um and if you don't feel that way, then I would probably look at these and go 80/20 and say, "Okay, what's the 20% that's driving 80% of the of the enterprise value?" And trim. Honestly, I would just like go completely passive on those ones or just return equity or do some sort of deal so I could get my attention back and then double down on the ones that you are good at. >> Okay. >> Yeah. And to be clear, I've done this, too. Like, I've gotten rid of portfolio companies and just said like, "Here's your equity back. I It's not worth it."

2:27>> Chasing too many small shots. Yeah, 100%. >> Yeah, it's hard. It's focus. It's the same thing. >> If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll fly you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.