MBM Commercial's M&A Snack & Chat Podcast

This week's episode has a very antipodean feel as our Australian host, Bryan, chats with another native Australian, Sascha McDonald. Sascha was a Founder and Non-Executive Director of Testing Performance which was recently acquired by Fimatix. A serial entrepreneur, Sascha chats about how the company got established in 2006 and why it took 15 years to find the perfect time to exit the business. He also discusses important things he learned during the sale process. The rapid fire favourite food definitely divides opinions - you either love it or hate it, there is no in between.

In Episode 23, we spoke to Charlie Cadbury of Say It Now on the acquisition of Get Started. In this episode, we get a view from the other side of that deal with our guest Norbert Horvath, the CEO & Founder of GetStarted. Was it a match made in heaven? Was it as easy and trouble-free as Charlie made out? Tune in to find out and don't miss Norbert's tips for tech entrepreneurs.

Our intrepid hosts are back! In this episode Bryan and Caroline chat with Say It Now Founder, Charlie Cadbury. If you've ever asked Alexa, Siri or Google a voice question, you'll be familiar with voice technology. Charlie's company creates voice apps and actionable audio ads to engage consumers over smart speakers. Charlie chats about the firm's rapid quick acquisition of GetStarted - a North American voice tech platform - which was done in just 100 days.

Joining our hosts this week is Jorge Juettner. Jorge was a self-described 'happy banker' at J.P Morgan before he decided to take the plunge to become Head of Partnerships at Ritmo, a company reinventing the way ecommerce businesses gain financing. Jorge talks about the business model and how Ritmo provides quick decisions and flexibility in repayments for growing ecommerce businesses. In the rapid fire round, Jorge takes the prize for the strangest place our podcast guests have visited.

Our snacking chatters are back after a brief hiatus to talk with Nishant (Nish) Varma from Safe Obstetrics. Nish chats about the groundbreaking medical device, the Fetal Pillow®, his father developed to help mothers and babies during a C-section. He explains how the firm broke into the American market, ultimately leading to the firm being acquired by CooperSurgical in early 2021.

This week our hosts are joined by Michael Holmes. Michael is the Chief Commercial Officer at Scale Space, Scale Space is a scale up community located in London and Nottingham designed specifically to help innovative businesses accelerate growth. In this episode Michael chats about his earlier career experience at PwC M&A Strategy - where he once got paid to go out to eat as many burgers as possible! He also chats about his new role at Scale Space, his ambitions for the concept and the scale up ecosystem and how important the community support that is being offered is to the businesses. Having started his new roles just before the pandemic hit, he shares his thoughts about trying to onboard staff virtually.

Joining Caroline and Bryan this week is Jon Dawson who heads up the Creative, Media and Technology team at haysmacintyre, an award winning firm of chartered accountants and tax advisors. Jon often gets involved in M&A matters at a very early stage. He chats about the impact of Covid on various sectors, M&A transactions, current valuations and why he loves working with companies in the tech sector. Despite being an excellent timekeeper, Jon is beaten by the klaxon on the 60 second Q&A challenge!

This is Part 2 of a two part podcast. We continue our conversation Al Zucker, General Counsel at Heroes. He talks about share deals versus asset deals and which type the Heroes team prefers, and what terms are the most important for the sellers. He also provides some tips for entrepreneurs looking to sell their business.

This week we are joined by Al Zucker who is the General Counsel for Heroes. Heroes acquire Amazon FBA businesses. In his role, Al is involved in multiple deals from smaller-sized acquisitions right through to multi-million £ transactions. He talks about the process involved to get the deal done and how the post-deal integration and personal involvement with the sellers is so fulfilling - and how, even, when you are doing multiple M&A transactions, the process can't be likened to a sausage factory!

Bryan took some well-deserved time off recently, so co-hosting this week is Caroline's colleague Alexander Lamley. As Alexander does a lot of work on options schemes, we invited this week's guest Charlie Blair from Gravitricity to chat about all things options. Why put them in place, when to introduce an options scheme, how to allocate options and how they can be a great incentive when a business is scaling up.

Joining us this week is Riccardo Bruni of Heroes (www.makeheroes.co). Heroes is a serial acquirer, building a portfolio of category-leading Amazon marketplace companies. With that business model, Riccardo has gone through the acquisition process many times. In this episode he chats about acquiring these 'mom & pop' businesses in record speed, guiding the businesses through the acquisition process and how Heroes looks to add value post-acquisition.

During the dot.com boom, today's guest Sheetal Mehta Walsh told Bill Gates exactly what she thought! He gave her a mission and with luck, hard work and some wonderful mentors, Sheetal started the first corporate-based investment strategy in the tech industry. She's gone on to facilitate over $1bn in funding for entrepreneurs, founded her own company with her partner (and turned down a multi-million dollar acquisition offer), and has recently launched the UK’s first all-female led venture capital fund, Soho Ventures. Sheetal explains during this fascinating episode!

This week, Giles Thompson joins Bryan and Caroline to chat about his experience as a lawyer and his skills with the Ctrl. F keyboard function. Sensing that there was a better way to do things, Giles joined Avvoka to help both sides of the M&A process manage their contracts and documents more efficiently. And in this week's snack choice, Bryan manages a very back-handed compliment to his wife's baking!

Joining our hosts this week is Tong Gu. Tong is currently an Investment Lead at Accelerated Digital Ventures, where she looks for investment opportunities in AI and machine learning. Before joining Accelerated Digital Ventures, Tong co-founded her own data analytics startup in Shanghai and scaled the team as COO. She talks about the the lessons she learned as a startup founder and how she now uses that insight in her current role.

We're venturing into the world of legal tech this week with our guest Sam Smolkin, Founder & CEO at Office & Dragons. Sam chats about how pulling all-nighters as an M&A lawyer inspired him to launch a data solution for all those hundreds of legal documents that always seem to need a last minute change.

This week our hosts snack and chat with Ed Lea, CTO of Charge Fairy, whose mission is to get easy access to electric vehicle charging. Ed chats about how he started out building apps, creating a mobile employee engagement platform which led to a joint venture with Ceridian's LifeWorks business. Having conquered employee well-being, Ed is now focused on the planet's well-being. He wants to make it easy and convenient for people to charge their electric vehicles - no matter where they are.

We are joined this week by a more professional snacker, Justin Gayner. He explains how, after a disappointing encounter at Oddbins, he relaunched his career. He ended up hosting his very own snack-themed YouTube show, before successfully launching the History Hit network, which was acquired by Little Dot Studies in 2020.

Our guest this week is Douglas Brown, who sold his business Star Net Geomatics to an international buyer. He discusses the journey to successfully sell his business, which included a 3.5 hour car ride in the middle of the night with his lawyer and adviser.

A festive special full of seasonal snacks and surprise guests! Music: Christmas Spirit by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com Christmas Spirit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Shane Ivers of silvermansound.com.

This week our intrepid hosts chat with Alex Hawes from Risk Capital Advisors, who explains all about M&A insurance, warranties, indemnities and mitigating risks involved in M&A transactions. He also manages to deflate our podcast hosts' egos by inviting some slightly better known podcasters to dinner in the rapid fire round.