Seeing Your Company the Way Buyers Do Changes Everything

Introduction

{John Halloran:} So, I would recommend SEG because a year and a couple of months after we closed the transaction, and I would still pick up the phone when they call, and feel like they’re just good people that I would help if I could, and if I needed something, I’d call them and see if they could be helpful. Just good people with a lot of deep experience in this area. And if you’re in SaaS software, having a specialist that really understands SaaS makes a big difference.

Meet the Founder of Mobile Health 

{John Halloran:} I’m John Halloran, CEO and founder of Mobile Health Consumer. We are a digital health and well-being platform. We serve 95,000 employers and six million employees and members, and we were acquired by H.I.G. Capital.

When I met the SEG team, it was clear from the beginning that they were willing to really shape the story and really come to us and say, ‘Okay, this is how you think you look, but this is how you look to the buying community.’

They dug in, they understood the story, they built the story. There was a lot of interaction back and forth.

What Changed When We Saw Our Business Through Buyers’ Eyes

{John Halloran:} We started to see ourselves differently through the eyes of SEG, and I thought that was a really valuable experience.

For the founders out there, the challenge is once you commit to a banker, if the process doesn’t conclude in a deal or you don’t get where you want to go, you’re pretty much shut down for another two years.

It’s a three-year commitment. So you’re really banking on each other. So really talking to a banker that has a track record of success, that does have a process, that does have a good reputation in the marketplace, really helps, and SEG ticks all those boxes.

Benefit of Industry Experience in SaaS 

{John Halloran:} The SaaS domain is really helpful because we didn’t have to educate SEG. In fact, it was the opposite. They’re like, “Hey, are those employees really should they be classified as R&D or services?” And we had this conversation early around how our financials should look based on what the market would expect, and it was very valuable. So yeah, the fact that there’s specialization in SaaS software is really, really helpful.

One Thing Founders Don’t Think About When Hiring an Advisor

{John Halloran:} I was very worried about having to step away from the business and having the business go sideways for a while I was away. And what I’d say is SEG did a great job, and I think a lot of it comes back to that structure we talked about. There’s a process. You’re not doing this for the first time.

H.I.G. as an Acquirer 

{John Halloran:} They invested in it because they see it’s got potential to grow and become a valuable company. I think early stages, when we were talking to H.I.G., we said, ‘We think there’s a play here for AI. We really do. We think that we’re going to be able to use AI to more personalize benefits in healthcare around the individual, and we think that’s going to be good.’

I think that H.I.G. understands what that opportunity is. We have billions of people around the world walking around with mobile devices. There’s no reason why we couldn’t put mobile health on all of them and have everybody have access to a nurse equivalent in their pocket all the time.

Building Competitive Tension (and Why It’s Essential)

{John Halloran:} The proof is in the pudding, proof is in the results. And I would say from a very early part of the stage, the team and SEG talked about competitive tension the whole time because I think you can build a great company as a founder. You can have a great product that you’re proud of.

Why do you hire a real estate agent to sell your home? Why do you hire a banker if you’re going to sell your business? That’s part of what they do every day. And if you are selling your business and you’re tied to it and you love what you do and you feel like it should be worth a billion dollars, it may not be or it may be, right?

But what you have is an advisor along with you to take the emotion out of it and say, ‘This is what it looks like from the buyer’s perspective.’

Advice to Other Founders

{John Halloran:} We weren’t trying to be something we weren’t. We were just describing to the market who we were, and SEG helped us put all that down on paper, present that to the buyers in a way where they understood where the business was, how it had grown, how we compete in the market.

To any founder and CEO, my advice would be

Get a good advisor because if you are a good entrepreneur, you’re an optimist by trade, but it’s good to have somebody that’s an unemotional balancing force to that. And so having the right advisor is just really critical. It’s like having a good lawyer, a good doctor, a good real estate professional. So you’ve spent a lot of time building this. Just be as thoughtful about who you select as you were about how you built your product and your team and your go-to-market, because it’s really important.

The ROI of Hiring Software Equity Group

{John Halloran:} So the ROI of selecting SEG, it’s pretty incalculable.

They know what the market’s looking for. They know it will be a big deal to the market. They know it won’t be, and they can guide you through that.

As a founder, you can get very emotionally tied to your baby. And you need somebody who’s sort of an honest broker that is unemotional, that can just say, ‘That’s all great, but this is what they’re going to focus on.’

You might only have one shot with somebody to really make a connection where they say, ‘Yeah, this is something I want to study further.’ And if you don’t know how to talk to what’s important to them, you’re wasting your time in there. So the ROI is just, like I said, it’s incalculable. Go with a professional for sure.

If I had to summarize SEG’s value in one sentence, I would say it’s getting founders and companies ready to explore their value in the market in a very professional and experienced way.