How many US targets did you seriously look at?
I’m not sure there’s a business in our space in North America that we don’t know and haven’t looked at in some way, shape, or form.
We’ve done lots of work on this, so it is a step that’s been carefully considered over a long period of time, and I’ve always talked about that as being a no-lose effort because we’re building there organically anyway. By researching the market, we were informing how we do that organic build.
This is the only target that we’ve talked to in a very serious way. We’ve probably done pretty significant work on about ten. We probably screened and looked at more than 100, and we know and have desktop researched many more than that too.
Is GDT’s CEO staying on?
Yes, we want to retain all of the people in GDT. We want to retain their operating structures and leadership structures.
We’ve been talking to them for six or seven months in detail about how we’ll do this together. We’ve got a value creation plan that both teams have developed, but it’s built around retaining the people and the structures and building on top of that.
Shawn [O’Grady] and his leadership team are an important part of that future, and they are very excited to be part of the journey.
We instigated this proactively – this wasn’t part of a competitive process. We got in touch with them. And the thing that convinced HIG to talk to us, because they weren’t ready to sell this year – they wanted to sell at some point further down the line – was that their team’s excitement to join forces with Softcat became pretty overwhelming. That was one of the things we were looking for. We wanted a team that wanted to be part of what we’re building, and Shawn and the rest of that team are exactly that.
Interview concludes on following page…
