Archive for category: Case Studies

Timothy O’Neil-Dunne has been an aviation and travel insider for years and his most recent business, Air Black Box, was acquired by 777 Partners in early 2019. Along with his fellow co-founders, Timothy was able to create a way for airlines to sell more seats by using new software to access very old technology which is the domain of just a few companies.

Why “Black Box”?

It turns out that airlines are not really interested in hearing about the technology behind innovative software, nor are they interested in the larger philosophical discussions about how they can still make money when their flights connect with airlines that stand outside the big three (SkyTeam, OneWorld, and Star Alliance) airline alliances. So rather than force these ideas on the airlines, they leaned into this lack of desire to understand technology and just called it “Black Box.”

They also conformed to the way that airlines and airports prefer to see proposals: as a per transaction cost. What does it take to get a passenger on that jet bridge waiting to board the plane? That’s what they understand and that’s how they built all of their projects. One of which was creating a new airline alliance, the Value Alliance, which mostly includes low-cost carriers.

What many of us who use online websites to do bookings don’t realize is that the slick and shiny software we use is connected to very old legacy software and technology. While these software operators still benefit from being able to sell tickets to people like us who want to buy them, airlines really still lack the ability to drive more revenue by airlines networking and cross-selling with each other. That’s where what Air Black Box was doing really made a difference that went straight into the bottom line for its clients.

Invest in People

Early in the process, Timothy and his co-founders made the decision to make sure that his employees had a stake in the future of the business by giving them some ownership shares. One third of the company was then allocated in such a way that if there was a future transaction, his employees would get a guaranteed amount. Whereas any speculative part of the deal that required more work would be his risk (but also his reward). When asked why, Timothy responded that his staff were loyal and went above and beyond. They were the type that if you called in the middle of the night they would do their best to try to figure out how to solve a problem.

Ask for Help

While he did bootstrap the company with his own funds, Timothy was also happy to partner with the government to get some matching grant funds. They approached Innovate UK and made the case for how their UK firm could obtain some significant international business if they could get some seed funding at a crucial stage. That funding was important early on when Air Black Box only had one customer, Changi Airport.

Invest in Technology

Part of the value of Intellectual Property (IP) in a future sale is the competitive advantage you have over others because of your technology. The other part is the ability to gain from adversarial lawsuits. The patents obtained by Airline Black Box combined with their transaction revenues made them an attractive target for 777 Partners, which has a collection of companies in its portfolio that it helps to scale to a high level of success.

There are many important and valuable businesses that exist all around us. But they are invisible because we don’t know they play a role in our everyday lives. We deal with a lot of these off-the-beaten-track businesses here at Apex. Give us a call if you’d like to learn more.

John MacInnes started Print Audit in 1999. He aimed his software at anyone who would normally charge people for printing costs, like law firms or schools. Those businesses were often very aware of photocopy costs, but not of direct printing costs, and the software Print Audit provided allowed those individual prints to be properly assigned and then billed to clients.

As time went on, Print Audit also put software in place to monitor ink and toner levels so that those companies with copier leases would experience less friction with service and refill calls. Instead of having to call up the service provider telling them that the machine was malfunctioning or that toner needed to be refilled, the software proactively notified dealers so that service interactions were enhanced and a lot of time and money was saved, by both the dealers and their customers.

Too Many Eggs in One Basket

The company was growing well, but a latent problem in their customer distribution forced them to make some drastic changes. One of their customers, Ricoh, was responsible for 70% of overall revenues, which was roughly $600,000 a month. Ricoh made a strategic acquisition and lost focus on this particular component (software helping to manage service calls) of their business. John noted that some of the people who were added to Ricoh during the acquisition were tasked to Print Audit, but they didn’t really know the company and in the meantime the $600,000 a month had plummeted to nearly $60,000 a month.

John had two insights: focus on the individual dealers rather than the corporate office, and switch to a subscription model. He did just that, not just making a better version of the software but making it a subscription service, and adding a number of key peripheral services that created a larger base of clients worldwide.

Focus on Retention

He also did something unexpected for a tech business: work on winning the retention game. As we discussed in an article about recurring revenue businesses, retention is a big part of success. John and his team made sure they were spending 80% of their time satisfying existing customers while spending the remaining 20% of time on adding features that would lure in new customers. At the time of acquisition, Print Audit had a 99.5% retention rate, so John figured if he wasn’t going to sell Print Audit, he might have another company in the stable: one that helped other companies improve their retention rates!

As it was, John had been building Print Audit for 20 years, originally on bootstrapped friend and family funds of $75,000. He saw that the industry was in consolidation mode, that there wasn’t room for too much more growth over time. Even though he had restructured the company in the aftermath of the decline of the Ricoh account, people were simply not printing as much as they used to… not simply because of the number of ways that paper was being saved digitally, but because of growing pressure for large companies to be more environmentally responsible, and printing on paper was one of those targeted areas.

Software as a Service

Interestingly, because he had transformed the company into a SaaS (software as a service) recurring revenue model, he became a smart strategic purchase for a large firm. While he says he wasn’t excited about the 2,000 items that he was assigned by the buyers for due diligence, he had a lot of support from his broker and banker to keep him on task and positively oriented towards a fruitful conclusion.

Key Lessons:

• Never be lopsided.  While John was alert and talented enough to pivot his company while it was in the midst of a revenue free fall, he should never have allowed one customer to be 70% of revenues.  Anytime any customer is more than 15% of revenues, you should be concerned and take the opportunity to diversify.
• Innovate in your space.  While the copier and print industry was probably slow to change because of its high capital costs, John invested in improving his software when it already was an industry leader.  That allowed him to grab even more uncontested market space.
• Don’t be afraid to own a category that isn’t a core competency.  Customer retention of a subscription product wasn’t a core competency of Print Audit…until it was.  John made it a priority, invested the people and resources in that direction, and the numbers say it all: 99.5% retention rate.  

There are many occasions we’ve seen a quick sale over the years. One of the two factors that can often lead to one is having an exit strategy. The other? A health scare. While sometimes the health scare is genetic and unrelated to the business, very often conditions in the business manifest in some health condition, and this causes a re-evaluation of priorities, and often, a sale.

Adorable

Jim Remsite was one of two partners that started a custom software company called Adorable. In an industry dominated by robotic and functional logos and names, Jim and his partner decided to zag with a sort of pink coral decor: “We wanted customers to love their software.” And they did. Jim and his partner started the company in 2014 and by the end of 2015 they were looking at $1.5M in topline revenue.

But towards the end of 2015, Jim’s partner decided that he wanted to move on to another project he was more interested in, and because they had a buyout agreement in place, they had a good starting point for discussions. Since this other project would take longer to start providing a salary, and because the buyout agreement was set for five years, they negotiated to get a lower total amount in exchange for it coming at an accelerated rate.

Losing a Partner

With the challenge of losing a partner, Jim decided to push himself hard. This was due in part, he confessed later, because he was trying to prove to himself and everyone else that he “didn’t need a partner.” And while the company did grow to $3M in topline revenue in 2016. By 2017 it had returned to its previous level, $1.5M, and Jim had to lay off almost half of the company.

It turns out that while Jim obviously didn’t “need a partner” to go out and sell, he needed someone to balance him out, and he also needed an easier path to going from managing 11 people to managing 23. People weren’t properly managed, the sales pipeline wasn’t properly cultivated, and bad results ensued.

The Headache

A short time after these layoffs Jim was at a conference and was struggling with a very bad headache. He thought that it might be due to the conference being held at altitude, but when resting in his room didn’t work he checked in with the paramedics and they found that he had unusually high blood pressure. He went to the hospital where they monitored him for the rest of the day. The next morning he was fine and brushed it off as just a possible fluke.

But a couple of months later it dawned on him that this might be symptomatic of how things had become unbalanced, and he decided to become proactive and look for a possible acquirer. While there were three suitors, he ended up selling to the company that was much much larger than his (around ten times larger in revenue) because he knew that the problems which had created the imbalance in the company would be rectified: he would get support staff for his sales efforts, and he’d be given a c-suite – a seat at the table without having the entire burden for running the company falling on him.

Don’t wait for a health scare to consider a business sale or transition. Give us a call today so that we can take a look and see what we can do to help.

Today, everyone knows about Airbnb, but not that long ago, a little company called Homeaway, based out of Austin, was actually the pioneer in the home sharing space.

Airbnb has larger market space in cities, but Homeaway still to this day has the largest inventory of vacation homes in the world. They did this by acquiring 25 other firms, like VRBO domestically and the top 1-2 services in several key countries around the world. This allowed them to raise half a billion dollars in capital, go public, then eventually sell to Expedia for $3.9B. Not bad for helping to list vacation homes.

The Industry

The original business model put forward by Homeaway and VRBO was a subscription model: you paid to be part of the platform annually, and got to keep all the income you generated as a result. But Airbnb drove change here, as they entered the market using a transactional model, meaning neither the owner nor the renter needed a “membership” in order to rent.

This led to rapid adoption, and rather than let Airbnb gobble up the market, Homeaway (and all its acquired companies) added the transactional model as an option for those who wished to use the platform. Many owners continued to use the subscription model, as it was much more beneficial for them financially, especially in high volume areas.

While Homeaway dealt with Airbnb as a direct competitor, it also dealt with the Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) like Expedia, Travelocity, and Hotwire who saw homes as a natural complement to their platforms that already booked flights, rented cars, and offered hotel rooms.

Why not go full spectrum and add vacation homes too? For a while, they tried to compete against a company which had as its sole focus homes. Then they gave up and decided to go into a bidding war to buy out Homeaway. As we noted above, Expedia came out on top.

Why?

Ross Buhrdorf, Homeaway’s founder, noted that he didn’t really care which of the OTAs acquired Homeaway, as the Homeaway team didn’t see a significant brand difference among them. He knew that the strategy would be the same: consolidate the back offices, keep all the separate platforms mostly as they were, and add built-in functionality to the OTA platform itself.

Most of the Homeaway executive team would be jettisoned from those positions, as an OTA wouldn’t need them. So they wanted to make sure that the payout was good, and it certainly was.

Takeaways

• Ross didn’t resent Airbnb’s entrance into the space he and his team had pioneered. In fact, when Airbnb showed the transactional model to be more successful, he adopted it as an option for his clients, both old and new, while keeping the subscription model that had worked over time. Never be too proud to take lessons from your competitors.
• Ross didn’t just face direct competition. Companies with much larger financial resources and profit motive tried to replicate what he was doing. But singular focus often trumps financial resources, especially if those financial resources don’t match the singular focus. In this case, Homeaway’s focus on vacation homes beat out the better-monied OTAs who didn’t have Homeaway’s secret sauce or existing customer base.
• Once you’ve beaten them, they can pay you. The acquisition by someone who had tried to take him down, in a way, must have been particularly satisfying for Ross and his team. Keep your head up when the competitors come at you. Focus on your company DNA and culture, keep your customers happy, and you might get a premium payout for your hard work.

Before Uber Eats and DoorDash became the VC-backed juggernauts in the food delivery space, Kenan Hopkins had already taken his 7 figure exit from this new space with lean margins. At the time of sale his company, Valet Gourmet, was doing $4M in annual revenue and employed 50 staff in Asheville, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Revenue Model

In 2011, the concept of home delivery of anything other than pizza seemed like magic. Customers loved the idea, and restaurants loved adding marginal additional revenue. The restaurants could make money they weren’t otherwise going to make (these customers didn’t want to leave their house, for whatever reason) and hence utilize unused bandwidth in their kitchens, and customers loved the idea of upgrading from *the* deliver-at-home option, pizza. Restaurants paid up to 30% of the total ticket before delivery, and the delivery drivers/riders got to keep the delivery fee plus any gratuity. Both customer and restaurant were willing to pay something to make this happen, and many companies were born out of the process.

Idiot Tax

Among the things Kenan says he would have changed would have been stopping the “idiot tax” sooner. Drivers of said tax included:

• Having no management skills (and not urgently acquiring them)
• Having no strategic plan (and not being more intentional about building one)
• Using credit card debt to bootstrap the business (and not restructuring that debt sooner)
• Having no company culture in place (and as a result having high turnover)

This all changed when Kenan read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness, about the founding of Zappos.

He realized that the company desperately needed reform from the inside out and he went to work, focusing on branding, core values, and aligning hiring practices with values like “Exceed Expectations Through Service.” Kenan particularly liked this value as it wasn’t customer service but just service which allowed the team to focus on kindness both inside and outside the company.

Accidents and a Text Message

A number of things happened nearly simultaneously which were stressful for Kenan and led him to say “enough.”

Two driver accidents happened and one driver got stabbed. Insurance covered all these situations and no one was permanently injured, but after 7 years of building, Kenan wondered, “what if” and sent a text message to a competitor in the industry:

“Would you buy Valet Gourmet for 50% of projected revenue over the next 12 months?”

The text received a positive reception, and before too long, a 50% cash, 25% stock, and 25% earn-out deal was negotiated. Kenan has learned to read his business growth really well and despite the fact that his previous year was $3.3M he felt confident he could hit $4 in that 12 month window. And he did.

Money isn’t enough

While Kenan says that he wishes he had asked to stay more involved in the business in some way, as a board member, for example, his biggest regret was not planning for having a big pile of money and no purpose. He lost himself in the lifestyle and became, in his own words, a massive jerk. It’s a theme we have discussed before, that planning for what comes after the sale is almost as important as working on the due diligence during the sale.

That’s perhaps the first lesson of many we can take from Kenan’s experience selling Valet Gourmet: Purpose matters.

While he used the exercise of adding company values and a clearer vision which drove better culture for his business, he could have taken some time to identify a core purpose within himself, which would have aligned with his business and given him some kind of roadmap for when that business went away.

The second lesson is closely connected: pay as little idiot tax as necessary.

Identify where you are weak and hire those weaknesses, either in employees, contractors, or advisors. As Ben Franklin once said, “Experience is an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other.” Learn from the experience of others rather than pay to learn yourself.

Finally, network within your industry.

Because Kenan was friends with the competition, he was able to start a sale negotiation with a text message. We can say we don’t often see such a move, but even if you don’t end up selling to the competition, being on friendly terms can often help you share important information, build a better business, and help with hiring.  Lead with kindness, but don’t let it be mistaken for weakness.

Have you been paying the idiot tax longer than you should have been?  We have access to many resources that can help you drive down and eliminate that tax altogether! Give us a call.