By mid-2011 while business was just beginning to get back on track following the GFC we began to think more about the future and where we saw Cadimage going.
Back in the previous year Lance Wiggs had joined Cadimage as an external director. Lance offered a someone controversial viewpoint at times, but in the very first instance he helped us become far more regular at “working on the business not in the businessâ€
We established monthly board meetings and covered a lot of day-to-day and more forward-looking topics before finishing with a nice lunch.
At some point we started exploring the idea of growth by acquisition and we quickly focused on our South Island reseller Andrew Ecker and Cadconsult. This was an obvious ‘target’ of me as it would allow us to offer a consistent brand, presence and service across New Zealand and thinking even further ahead I believed it would be advantageous in the event we came to sell the business to have it ‘all under one roof’ so to speak.
Previously, sometime before the GFC, I had broached the subject with Andrew and we had some initial discussions. We (mainly me) got the wrong end of the stick so things went nowhere at that time.
Therefore, in August 2011 we tried it again, and this time we had both the experience and the independent viewpoint provided by Lance. We both talked about things from our perspective and then started thrashing out how things might look and work if we merged. Over a number of meetings, we got into financials and with Lance’s help took a very straight forward approach about what value we had and therefore what percentage of Cadimage Cadconsult was worth in order to issues shares to that level in exchange for the Cadconsult business.
Ultimately and this was critical it came down to how we felt about things and did it feel “right†for everyone. By this point arguing if it should be 20 or 21% became meaningless as we all felt comfortable and at a point where we just wanted to get on and make it happens .The numbers had been an important part of the overall process but the general discussions and feelings are what made us all know it would be successful. When the sum of the parts is greater the exact value of the parts becomes less important.
Jumping to the Sale of Cadimage in 2016, I believe all parties in this original merger were happy with the overall outcome and saw the 2011 merger as an important milestone towards the sale.