Great Range Capital’s Christie McFall featured on M&A Masters podcast
Our own Business Development Director, Christie McFall, recently spoke with Patrick Stroth, Founder, President and CEO of Rubicon Insurance Services, LLC, on an episode of his podcast, M&A Masters.
Patrick and Christie cover a lot of ground during their discussion, including:
The importance of chemistry and shared goals in M&A
You’ve got boots on the ground and it supports the philosophy that I share: that mergers and acquisitions are not the combination of Company A buying Company B. It is one group of people choosing to work and combine forces with another group of people. And when you put those together in an ideal situation, the intent is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. —Patrick
Why we want to work with businesses that take selling personally
We want owner-operated businesses that are healthy and strong. Those folks usually stay involved at least for a time and roll some equity in alongside us to help grow the business. And we understand that the business is important to them. Their families usually work there. Lots of the people in the town are there. … We aren’t coming in to put in 10 new executives, sweep out the management team and start anew. … We want them to run their business. We might bring in somebody who can grow it from a strategic level, either a CFO or CEO, some board members, but we don’t want to run the business. We want them to do what they do best. —Christie
The benefits of partnering with a smaller firm
The lower-middle market is large, but it’s really underserved. And I mean underserved in a big way because if you don’t have in-house core dev or you haven’t gone through a lot of transactions and you’re a founder, you don’t know where to turn. And by default, they’re going to pick the brand-name large institutions and go in that direction to seek help. …
And the large institutions, while they’re very large, they don’t have the bandwidth to handle the solutions or deliver an alternative to a smaller client. And so the lower-middle market company ends up getting some prepackaged solution. And so they’re not only overlooked and underserved, they exit poorer—I’ll put it politely—not as rich as they would otherwise if they’d partnered with a firm like GRC. —Patrick
The 20-minute conversation covers other topics, like how Great Range Capital got its start, rep and warranty insurance, and COVID-19’s effect on deal terms.