{Alex Gile:} My name is Alex Gile. I’m one of the founders and former president of Nexternal, which is an ecommerce platform provider that enables manufacturers, distributors, as well as retailers to sell online, either directly to consumers or to other businesses.
{Alex Gile:} Looking at the time, in 2015 there were a lot more competitors in the space than there were in 1999, and a lot of the competitors were starting to raise substantial amounts of money. So I was looking around at this space and looking at what people were paying to acquire customers and as a small profitable company, it was becoming increasingly tougher to compete against those companies that had raised $75 million, $100 million plus dollars. So I decided either needed to raise a lot of money to compete or needed to sell to a bigger company where we could sell our software into their client base. So I decided to do the latter and shortly thereafter we engaged Software Equity Group to help us with that process.
{Alex Gile:} The reports that SEG comes up with are ones that probably every advisor and every software CEO and CFO looks at on a quarterly basis. They know the market probably better than any other company in the world.
{Alex Gile:} Working with an advisor gets you a lot more opportunities that you would otherwise not have. We were able to give demos to some really big name software companies and get them interested in our company and I’m quite confident had I done everything on my own that wouldn’t have been the case. Another big benefit to working with an advisor is that they can coach you along the way and help you really think through positioning and how you want to present your company to potential buyers.
{Alex Gile:} When you’re running a company and your heads down and you’re working in a very myopic world, it’s sometimes tough to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Software Equity Group was really able to look at the bigger picture and help us position Nexternal to make it attractive. Overall, I would highly recommend Software Equity Group to any company that’s even thinking about selling their company. Even if you’re not going to sell for 3-4 years, I think getting to know the folks there, seeing their reports, having them help you understand the market is invaluable.
{Alex Gile:} I love the team culture. One of our early meetings was you know, getting together, and we’re out there enjoying the ocean breeze and you can see a little bit of the ocean, you know, having breakfast. I think I’d met Allen to surf a couple times. I like the laid back approach but I also really appreciated the fact that everybody I met with was genuine. And even going through the process of a company making a verbal offer, if it wasn’t right, Allen would say, “hey, this isn’t right, I think we could do better than this”, and I appreciate that kind of candor. I’m super grateful I took Kris Beible’s call and got together with these guys and was able to have them by my side as we went through the process. I think, you know, the opportunities that they provided to us, the amount that I learned about my own business, and the mentoring are really invaluable and worth every dime.
