REDD – Business and Technology Podcast Episode 008 with Brad Shaw from InterFinancial

In Episode 008 of REDD’s Business and Technology Podcast our hosts Jackson Barnes (BDM – REDD), Brad Ferris (CEO – REDD) and Nigel Heyn (Founder – REDD) interview Brad Shaw, CEO at InterFinancial, a Brisbane based Corporate Finance and M&A Advisory Firm. In this episode we discuss how to get the highest valuation for your business and how technology impacts on your business valuation.

If you would like to discuss any of the topics discussed in this episode further with a REDD expert or if you would like to be a guest on the show please get in touch either via our website, [email protected] or through any of the links below.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/redd-digital/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradley-ferris/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonpbarnes/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-shaw-03aaa0b/

Thanks for watching!

You can read the full transcript below:

– Hello and welcome to “REDD’s Business and Technology Podcast.” I’m your host, Jackson Barnes,

– and I’m your co-host Brad Ferris. And today we sat down with Brad Shaw, who’s the CEO of InterFinancial. He provided some valuable insights on scaling your business, mergers and acquisitions, and getting your business ready for sale. All right, Brad Shaw, CEO InterFinancial. You’ve focused on everything: business valuations, merger, acquisitions, strategy, growth advisory, getting investors ready.

– [Brad Shaw] We do.

– Hopefully get some really good insights from you today. Did you want to start with your background before we get into InterFinancial and everything wonderful they’re doing? Just yourself personally.

– Yeah, A unique pathway to corporate finance. I’m an engineer and spent 25 years in engineering, procurement, construction businesses, John Holland being one and WorleyParsons and another great Australian company in Ausenco here in Brisbane. In roles from working in the field building stuff right through to managing three or four countries for WorleyParsons. And then I also looked after APAC and Africa for Ausenco. So looked after large regions of engineering businesses. And then about five years ago made a pretty big shift in my career and went into corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions specifically in strategy work. And have been doing that for four or five years now. And I’m currently the CEO of InterFinancial.

– [Jackson Barnes] Why did you make that change?

– The short part of that story is I went overseas and did some study at a good school and had a bit of an epiphany while I was away. And I guess really at that time in my life and my career, I wanted to do more of what I liked doing and less of what I didn’t like doing. And sort of found through that course that strategy and corporate advisory and macroeconomics and finance were all real passions of mine. And really my career choices prior to that was moving more and more towards that. And then I took the leap of actually sort of saying, “Right, well I want to make a career out of this even though I’m getting a bit old.” And so focused on sort of building a network in that area and then build a business myself, and then sort of turn that business into, basically merge that business into InterFinancial and been working there ever since.

– Nice. So you found what you’re good at and then jumped in and started InterFinancial. Was that by yourself or you have business partners as well?

– Yeah, no, just to clarify, I didn’t start InterFinancial. InterFinancial’s been around 35 years. Basically my little practice, I just sort of basically took a couple of customers in and then started working there as an employee basically managing the consulting practices, helping the businesses that InterFinancial was working with. And that part of the business grew and then got promoted up to CEO about two years ago.

– Nice, awesome. So explain InterFinancial, what they do. What do they specialize in?

– Yeah, It’s interesting. Corporate finance is the sort of the term that you’d call it. Mergers and acquisitions advisory is another sort of way to describe the same thing. Investment banking is another one, but some of those terms sort of mean different things to different people and are used in different contexts. But look, really we’re in the mid-market. So we help businesses sort of $20 million to $200 or $300 million in enterprise value. And we help them typically sell their business if we’re working on the sell side or we help large businesses listed and others acquire businesses in that sort of size in the market as well. So we do a lot of transaction advisory work. And so basically what we’re doing there is project managing the process of of a transaction of a sale or helping raise equity or helping find debt or whatever to help businesses grow. So that’s corporate finance, banking for businesses. And to do that often we have to help develop strategies, set strategies and execute strategies because maybe a business isn’t quite ready to sell yet, or they need to, you know, fix some things before they’re ready to sell or to get the valuation that they’re looking for. So it’s a lot of growth advisory, you know. How do we help a business achieve their objectives and their shareholders achieve their objectives. So it’s super fun field. We just help really good people in a really important time, because I think there’s some great businesses out there, but it’s rare that somebody that’s great at a business has also done lots of mergers and acquisitions and so it’s a really important area for them. A lot of their net wealth is tied up in these things in these businesses and we help them in a really important time go through a really important process. And so it’s a lot of fun helping those people do that.

– [Jackson Barnes] Yeah. So how many people in InterFinancial right now? Are you in just Brisbane?

– Yeah, so just based in Brisbane and we’re a boutique, so a lot of our competitors. they might do audit and tax and financial accounting and those sorts of things. We don’t do any of that. We’re just specifically M&A and and growth advisory. And we’ve got about 15 people in our business at the moment and we’re ranked fifth in the country as far as M&A businesses in the country, which is super great for us. Being a small boutique, you know, and some of the businesses that are behind us on that list, you know, are international brands and-

– That’s impressive.

– and, and probably bigger from the outside, but we say we certainly sort of punch above our weights with respect to what we achieve for our customers here.

– Yeah, that’s awesome. So on this show we, we try and tie everything to business, which it sounds like you were an expert in, and technology. How does technology affect a business valuation?

– In a couple of ways. I think that if you talk about value creation increasing valuation, I think technology is often a very important differentiator in a business in how well a business does and in how well a business differentiates itself from its competitors. And so the valuations of a business doing the same thing in the same market, if the technology advantage is with one competitor over another, then the valuation is higher. And the valuation’s higher for a couple of reasons. One is that it makes more money if it’s a differentiator cause a differentiator isn’t a differentiator unless it makes more money. Lots of people think that differentiation is just you can say it and it is, but we look at it as from a financial point of view. Secondly, if you want to scale your business and grow your business, technology can often unlock a lot of that and allow you to be able to grow quicker because you’re not relying on the people for professional services. They’ll trade at three to five times or something for certain values. If you can productize that, if you can productize that technology into a way where you can sell many and have less people working on it, then you can actually sell a lot more. You can make a lot more money and you can scale it. So an acquirer could buy the business and could see the growth. Because an acquirer of a business isn’t worried about what the business made last year. It’s worried about what it is going to make next year,-

– [Jackson Barnes] The opportunity.

– and how to grow that. So it can be a value accretion capability from a valuation point of view. I think the other side of it is, it’s a hygiene point of view as well. And so if you don’t have the security that you need to have, if your board’s not focused on that, if you’ve had issues with respect to cybersecurity or even if you’re just not as efficient as you can be in executing your business because you don’t have your technology right. Basically a buyer looks at a business and says, well you know, that business is making $5 million but it’s going to cost me $500,000 or a million dollars to fix all of that stuff and that’s the way I’m going to run this business cause I care about this stuff. And so it will just take that off the purchase price and it’ll just say, I would’ve given you $20 million, but now I’m going to give you 19 cause I need to put a million dollars in to fix it. And so it can discount the value of your business if you don’t have it right. And it can increase the value of your business if you use it as a differentiator.

– Yeah, right. So you look heavily at technology when you are assessing a business for growth, and if they’re ready to sell, for example, you actually look at their technology?

– Yeah, it’s an interesting question. For technology businesses, you look at the technology lot.

– Yup. Yeah.

– And so there are some businesses that are say a software business or those type of things, yes. And you know, we have a specific group in our business called IFL Ventures, which is focused specifically on high IP rich businesses. And, Graham McCall does an amazing job in assessing the technology and assessing how that technology works in its market and what differentiates it and what its chances of scaling and those sorts of things. And so there is a whole bunch of expertise that you need to assess technology if you’re a technology business. So, I sort of put that in one bucket. And then the other bucket is if you’re buying a business that does whatever it does being sell tanks or clean schools or whatever, then you look at technology, I guess, through that sort of hygiene lens of saying, does this business have the technology that it needs to do what it does? It’s not necessarily a differentiator to the valuation of the business from a competitor point of view, but it is certainly a hygiene factor. And so during a due diligence process, which is where you look most forensically through a business, so that’s after you’ve decided to buy a business and you’ve made that commitment, albeit non-binding, then you go through a confirmatory due due diligence process. We would have probably seven or eight streams that we look through a business. Health and safety, financial performance, tax, legal, commercial. Technology would be one, quality would be another and others. And so to be honest, it’s one of a stream of a range of things that you look at. But it’s not certainly, front and center. Typically the focus in due diligence is on the commercial and financial performance of the business and the future outlook for it and those type of things. But what you tend to get right at the end of a due diligence process is you have a bit of a renegotiation around the value of things. And that’s where these issues might come out and say, well, you know, you’ve got a tech debt of $3 million here and so that’s fine, we’re not judging you, but we’re not paying you for it either. Cause we’re going to have to pay for that.

– Yeah, interesting. So 20 years ago, most businesses were very paper-based and, you know, there’s just forms everywhere, that kind of thing. And these days most businesses are in Microsoft 365 or have SaaS based applications and are fairly digital. Does that affect valuation at all, how paper-based versed digital a business is?

– Yeah, I think it goes to something similar. If you see a business is unable to grow, and typically a paper-based business or a spreadsheet based business even, you start to doubt whether you can grow. And really, as I said, you’re valuing a business based on, the usual way that you would value a business is the earnings of the business multiplied by a multiple. And so that multiple is number of years of return. So if I’m paying five times, it’s going to take me five years to get that money back unless the business grows. If it grows at 50% a year, then that number comes right down and you’ve paid back the investment in two years or three years in that time. But, so it’s a very, very important lens to look at from an investor’s point of view or a buyer’s point of view. They’re looking at how quickly this business can grow, and most businesses are being acquired for growth, not for steady state operation. And so I think that the pertinent point with respect to your question is that if you’ve got a paper-based system or a spreadsheet based system, or you’ve got stuff everywhere and it’s not automated, you’re going to see barriers to growth in that business and you’re going to devalue that because of that. Whereas if you see a business that’s, and that’s why software businesses and tech businesses have amazing multiples because you develop one piece of software and you sell it to many, and if it’s not too bespoke per application, then you can grow the business really quickly and it will grow. And so I think that’s an extreme example for a technology based business, but I think that applies to every business that if you can look into a business and see that it can scale and see that it can grow and that technology and paper-based systems aren’t a barrier to growth, then you’re going to be more confident and therefore you’re going to pay more. And, and so yes, I do think it affects valuation.

– Yeah, it’s good advice. And I think it’d be very hard to scale a business if you were posting out mail and letters for internal communications instead of messaging over teams and email and stuff these days, that’s for sure.

– Yeah. Look, just even the confidence, to be honest, in the due diligence process. The due diligence process is you create a data room, a virtual data room, and you pile a stack of stuff in there. Now if that’s a bunch of PDFs that are all over the place or there isn’t records and documents and all that sort of stuff, it makes due diligence harder, it makes the confidence in the business lower, it makes the negotiation afterwards more critical. And so just even that, you know, basically the process of buying a business takes about six to nine months. And if every time through that process you’re just seeing poor records and poor record keeping or lack of efficiency or manual processes and all those sorts of things, your confidence just drops through that period. And so, even from just the way you present your business for sale, I think it’s important to have those things right.

– Yeah. If you ask for a document and they take a month to get it back to you, it’s probably a bad sign of what you’re buying, that’s for sure. So I want to touch on cybersecurity. It’s a big topic we discuss all the time. We’re big advocates for cybersecurity. And especially right now with all the recent events going on in Australia, it’s a big topic. Anyone who’s opened any news outlet on TV or phones or whatever is conscious of the big attacks that have happened recently. What part does cybersecurity play in business valuation?

– Yeah, so as a CEO, my board is certainly very interested in cybersecurity and has certainly felt over the last year or two that the Australian Institute of Company Directives, I think is doing a pretty good job of giving you guys plenty of things to do. And so you owe them.

– [Jackson Barnes] I remember last week.

– Yeah. Send them a bottle of wine at the end of the year. I think that boards are really worried about it, shareholders are really worried about it, and that means CEOs and people who run businesses are really worried about it. And so it’s one of those topics that comes into the transaction process where there’s a few more questions about it starting to creep into our processes. And probably two or three years ago we weren’t seeing those questions in there. So it is coming to the fore.

– I’m interested in actually, Brad. How do you gauge a business’s cybersecurity landscape? Such as is there frameworks you ask them for or questions you ask? How does that work?

– Yeah, I think that there’s obviously the standards, I don’t know the number of the standard, but there’s a standard.

– [Brad Ferris] 27001.

– Thank you. But we’re not seeing sort of, give us your last audit for that and those types of things. From an artifacts point of view there’s where are your policies? Where are your history? Who’s your provider?

– [Brad Ferris] Controls, general controls.

– Yeah. So it would be similar content to what’s in those questions. I’ve been through that with our business and they’re sort of asking the types of questions in there. They’re not just saying if you’re certified or, you know, what’s your score on that framework or anything like that. They’re actually digging that next bit down and asking sort of direct questions. And I think where they’re getting the questions from is their own audits that they’ve done themselves or from providers like yourself or whatever. We haven’t seen teams like yours come into due diligence, but I don’t think it’s far away where in those streams that I talked about, there’s a tax person that does the tax stuff. There’s a financial person that does the financial stuff. There’s a legal person, that does the legal stuff. I don’t think it’s too far away where we’ll see an IT or a cybersecurity expert come in and do it, particularly working in defense and some other areas that are a little bit more sensitive at the moment. And, then there’s obviously a little bit more focus about how that works. But those questions are either from their audit or they’re coming from the AICD. They’ve done a good job, I think, in telling directors, you know, these are the kind of questions you should be asking and this is the kind of satisfaction that you should be gaining, and if you see this, these are the kind of things that you need to do. And so I’m sort of seeing questions coming through data rooms in from those sort of two areas.

– Interesting. And I was going to ask you kind of what are the trends you’re seeing develop over the past 6, 12, 18 months? So you had made a comment about the automation and systems, and we were talking about paper-based, but probably more so spreadsheet-based companies, the change in risks. What are the key trends you’re seeing in the market that buyers are looking for, sellers are looking at?

– With respect to technology?

– Just in general?

– Oh, all right. Look, there’s a bit going on in the world economically, as you may know. Some stuff going on in Europe that’s affecting energy prices and it’s also affecting inflation, it’s affecting interest rates and you know, obviously all of those things. So they’re what’s fascinating everybody. And what that’s meaning I think, is that there’s still a lot of activity around. I think in transactions when everything’s going up in the world, there’s transactions for one reason. When everything’s going down in the world, there’s transactions for different reasons. I think that growth is hard to come by at the moment. And so people are sort of looking for growth because the returns that they’re getting from their base business are perhaps taxed a little bit. A year or so ago, it was post COVID, everyone was flushed with money, debt was cheap. I think my sense of it was that people survived COVID and went, gosh, we’re bulletproof now. If we can survive that, we can survive anything. And they all went away and had a strategy workshop and decided world domination was just around the corner. And then we’re buying things because money was cheap and they were confident. And so I think it was a record year in M&A for a lot of firms including ours last year. You know, fast forward to six or eight months later. Interest rates have gone up. So, debt is a little harder to get. So that’s changing the structure of some transactions. Maybe there’s a little bit more equity components. So people aren’t taking debt out and paying for businesses in cash. They’re saying, you have some of my company and we will merge effectively or transact with script. And I think also, people are a little bit more risk averse. So last year people were sort of really pressing hard to get things done really quickly. And while there’s always time pressure on transactions, I think this year if you see a business and you’re going through due diligence and you have one bad month through the due diligence process, buyers are going, oh hang on, let let me just have a look and, let’s give it another two months and we’ll see whether it rebounds and then we’ll progress again. Those sorts of things are starting to just slow, a little bit more risk averse. And I think that’s just in general. It buys a bit of time for the buyer and the seller to be honest, but also, what’s happening in the world is changing so quickly that the reason why you decided to buy something in the first place might not be the reason why.

– Changed throughout that due D process. No, that’s interesting.

– I want to get some more of your insights, Brad, you probably see this all the time. What’s a mistake you’ve seen of someone going to sell their business where they should have looked out for something really important, but they haven’t.

– Yeah, that’s the long list.

– Yeah, yeah. Maybe just like a top two.

– Yeah. And I think the answer is that you learn something different every time, and you sort of have to do a thousand things perfectly. And if you do one thing poorly, it can really cost you. And so I think that the expectation that you can actually just run your business well for an exit is tricky. You can improve your odds, but it’s not an absolute. I think that the thing that we see the most is that I would suggest you run your business with an investor’s lens. And so what I mean by that is often you’ll sit in your boardrooms or your executive teams and you’ll be sitting down and if you’re a really good business, you’re thinking about your business’s and your shareholder’s return, and your people. If you’re a great business, you might think about your customers and what they need and what’s driving their decisions. And that helps you drive your decisions, which helps you with all your business and the like. Probably where I see too few businesses do is have the investor, the person that is going to buy the business sort of either virtually in that room, or at least be thinking about what they’re thinking about. Because I’ve seen businesses that have gone and spent 10 years growing a division of their business and are so proud at the end of that 10 years that they’re ready to sell because they’ve finally got that thing going after nine years of losing money and they’ve made money and we go out to sell it and nobody wants that thing that they’ve just spent 10 years building. And if they had 10 years ago gone, if I build this thing, will it make me more valuable? Will it make me less valuable? Will it make me more interesting to more buyers or more interesting to less buyers? Am I going to create value here or am I going to erode value here? And so if you just imagine an empty seat in your boardroom that is the future buyer of your company, that would be probably the single smartest thing that I could imagine. And that’s a lot of what we do at InterFinancial, is actually bring that investor’s lens into your considerations. And a lot of our strategy advisory work is around making sure that we just consider the future investor in the current decision making.

– It’s really good advice actually. Like empty seats on the board.

– It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

– Yeah.

– So think about the concept. It’s not all that common.

– I wanted to get some more of your insights around, and this can be like a top two as well, you don’t have to speak for an hour, on things that you recommend or most commonly recommend to businesses to get ready to sell.

– Yeah, I think that first one that I just said is the first thing that we recommend. So take that as item one. And I think that people can get a bit caught up in second guessing the buyers. So you can sort of, you can go, I need to sell this part of my business or get into this new market or need to make those decisions now because I’m going to get ready to sell in a year or two’s time. Actually, what you’ll find is that probably 50% of the time we could almost write down on an envelope who we think is going to buy the business before we go through a sale process. And we’ll be pretty close, you know. It’ll be that company or something somewhere similar. But just as often, we we’re actually surprised by where the interest comes and where the strategic value that a buyer would see in a business. And so if you’re going, the only person that’s going to buy this business is businesses like that. I think you can be quite tunnel visioned as opposed to actually opening it up. And so one of the processes that we do a lot prior to going into a sale process, is we do a market sounding. We actually sort of look at who are all the suppliers to this business? Who are the competitors of it? Who are the customers of it? Who is the private equity firms that have invested in this kind of business before? And prior to even deciding whether to go to sale or not, we will call a couple of those companies up and we’ll actually do a bit of a market sounding and saying, hey, are you interested in these kind of businesses? What are you valuing? Why, you know, what’s your interest? Where’s your strategy going? What do you see in the market? And those things. And what that can do is it can really help inform you about who might be interested and why and where the value might be. And so I guess the first thing is to have the investor in the room, virtually. And then the second thing is that have a pretty broad view of who might be interested in your business. And if you’ve got the time as a business owner or as a board member, spend some time talking to those types of people and build relationships and do joint ventures with them, or do bits of work together because that might be actually where the great value comes from and where the great deal comes from. And so they’re probably the two.

– So typically when would you start on that journey with a business? You mentioned that virtual investor in the room. How long could you potentially be advising on that with the business before they ultimately find that buyer?

– Yeah, so like most advisors you say as soon as possible. But I think that everybody, regardless of whether they got an advisor to do that or not, I think you start with the end in mind in some ways or at least have a few options about the end in mind always. I think you should always sort of be thinking about that investor in the room all the way along. As far as you know, where we help, we’ve helped businesses for five, 10 years through that process. There’s one business that comes to mind, where they actually had a professional service, project based business. They had a little piece of internal software that was a fabulous piece of work that was actually what helped productize their service. When we did a review of it, we said, that’s a gem. If you can actually turn yourself into a technology business that sells that, that’s really worth something. And, five or six years later they got a fantastic outcome. And so being able to identify those things early and give the business some time. But we’ve done that for five or 10 years at the longest example. And then there are other times that we do it, we’ve got two or three now where they’re going to market probably February, March next year and we’re doing a review of their business now and a and a pre-sale readiness. And so it just gives you less time to be able to do it, but it can be done.

– So in that example, the professional service businesses business that you advised to focus on the technology, how did that come about? Did they tap you on the shoulder or was it a chance kind of meeting at a networking event? I guess if you’re a kind of, well not a startup, but a smallish business looking to grow, you might not have someone in that virtual chair that goes, we should talk to someone like InterFinancial at this stage. So just curious how that unfolds.

– The vast majority of our engagements would come through referrals. And so that’s because we build a network and the boards that I’m on and that Sharon, our chair is on, everybody in InterFinancial sort of speaks about this and so we go to owner manager programs and train people up and tech groups and all of that sort of stuff. And so that helps a great deal in just planting that very seed. And then I guess other businesses find us through their accountants or their lawyer or something like that, that they’re getting some help for. And, then they’re asking a question that an advisor or an accountant or a lawyer knows that they know a bit about, but would would like somebody that was a specialist and that work comes through sort of that channel.

– [Brad Ferris] Yeah. Cool.

– So what’s next for InterFinancial? A lot of time CEOs get Chief Vision Officer mistaken in their title. What, what’s happening next at InterFinancial?

– Yeah, so it’s a fabulous question. I think we’ve got a a very successful practice, which we’re really proud of. And I think that what we’re doing is going through a transition where we’ve actually had individuals sort of be a shining light. Particularly Sharon, our chair, has been sort of the face of the business. And we’re corporatizing and doing what we would advise our clients to do, which is to take a single person risk out of the business by actually making it a combination of people that actually contribute to the outcome. And so that’s a really important sustainability goal for us. The sustainability of our earnings, I mean. And then, I guess for us also, we have the opportunity now that we’re more mature to perhaps take a more, I guess, strategic role with some of our customers and actually take them on a journey and actually be part of that journey a little bit more directly financially, I guess. And so, you know, we’re certainly considering things where we might look at fund management or look in investment in businesses or actually helping them on the journey. We feel like often we create a lot of value and we are really proud and pleased for our customers, you know, and then probably there’s an opportunity for us to sort of capture some of that ourselves as well. Cause we’ve got a unique combination of people that, you know, everyone at InterFinancial in a senior role has had a career prior to being in M&A. And so we have the operational and execution experience we feel like it’s a chance for us to exploit that.

– Makes sense. I mean, no one really starts out of the gates in M&A I would say, and getting ready to scale makes a lot of sense and that’s probably something that Nigel we do here at Redd, right? But when we first started, it was hugely led by yourself, in your name and now we’re, 45 plus and growing rapidly. Did you want to touch on that Nigel?

– Yeah, well I guess in the theme of this Brad, we’ve got a technology business, and as a owner of a tech business, it would be, you know, not the right thing to ask, how would you as an owner get fit if there’s two things that you recommend from a technology point of view? You mentioned before about the discounting that you see. Is there a common theme? Is it poor infrastructure? From just from a pure tech point of view, you know. We exist to make businesses better through technology and you and I have spoken about a lot of the transactions we worked on, you know, one mutual client together.

– Yes.

– What would you provide us that advice for someone that says, look, in three years time I want to be fit. What should they be doing today from a technology point of view?

– Yeah, from a technology point of view, I think the hygiene stuff is just a no-brainer. And that’s exactly why it’s called hygiene. So, cybersecurity is just an expectation now. It’s not a nice to have. And then I think, the clouds and getting things off your premises and getting the protections and the factor authentications and all that sort of stuff, all of that is just what everybody’s got. And so if you’re not there, the first thing to do is get there. Because you just got to get there. I think that beyond that, I think when you’re talking about capturing value from a technology point of view or using it as a differentiator, I think that if you look out in the market, you see businesses that are valued in different ways because of different things. And if you can get recurring revenue, subscription based revenue, if you can get the growth profiles right, if you can get the amount of effort per sale up, in tech businesses, sorry, the amount of effort that you need per sale down so that the value goes up, all of those things are all of the things that you can see in the market that they’re valued. And so you follow that principles and you try and sort of emulate those things. Then for those businesses that are using technology to do something that isn’t purely technology driven business, but is a differentiator for you. I think one of the things that I would consider is who’s the best person to do that? In engineering businesses, we had a lot of software and we did it all in house and we were poor at developing software. We were poor at keeping it up to date. And we thought it was super awesome. But then when you actually look at how much money and effort you put into it and what those people who are good engineers or good accountants or whatever could be doing if they weren’t doing this poorly, then you’d actually go get it done somewhere else. And so I think that, you know, having a very brutal and honest look at your core business and what you actually are and what your relationship with technology is. Am I a technology company or do I use technology as a benefit for my business? In which case, and even within technology, I’m sure you know more than me, but you know, you could be a good software company but not a good hardware company. You could be a good hardware company, but not a good integration company. You know, whatever it might be. Or implementer or a project executor or whatever. Understanding those things properly and knowing limitations and then getting the help that you need for the things that you’re not good at are probably the things that I’d suggest.

– Fantastic. Thanks for that advice.

– Thanks Brad. You’ve shared some really good insights and technology definitely plays a big part in M&A and growth of organizations, so I was really glad you shared that with us. If anyone wants to reach out to you and get some advice or they’re considering selling or buying a company, how can they reach you?

– Yeah, our website’s probably a good place to start. All our numbers and names are on there and email addresses, so reach out to me personally if needed, but anyone in the team would be happy to help.

– Awesome, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it Brad.

– Thank you.

– Thanks Brad.