Back to business ( to business )
Steve Monnington of Mayfield Merger Strategies , looks at how Steve Brooks got back to B2B and rounds up this month ’ s M & A activity
When you sell your business for a substantial sum of money you become a magnet for private banks , private equity firms and companies wanting to sell their business to you . This was the experience of Steve Brooks , who sold his Mack Brooks exhibition company to Reed in early 2019 . Covid-19 acted as a brake on in-bound enquiries and enabled him to think clearly about how he wanted to invest some of the Mack Brooks sale proceeds . He wanted to invest into an industry he understood but not back into mainstream exhibitions and he wanted to take the good attributes of private equity involvement and leave behind the downsides .
The result is the formation of Market Dynamic Media ( MDM ) a private PE fund financed by his own holding company with Clarion ’ s Simon Kimble as chairman . It ’ s early days so for now it ’ s just the two of them at the centre . Their first acquisition is DCD International ( DCD ) – Data Centre Dynamics - which is very definitely not in the Mack Brooks mould of traditional trade shows . DCD is focused on the data centre sector and started out life in 1988 as a publishing business , before moving into training and conferences . As a result of Covid-19 , greater emphasis was placed on digital content and now the revenue (£ 8.4m in 2021 ) splits into 60 % online ( marketing , broadcast and interviews ) and 40 % from face to face training and events . Brooks believes that digital and physical can co-exist without cannibalisation of marketing spend .
More acquisitions will follow , funded privately , and will continue to focus on online driven businesses with niche tightly defined communities that own monetisable high quality data . “ Online ” is the key word here and events may or may not be part of the mix . It ’ s good to have a different and very focussed take on the PE model which increases the opportunities for entrepreneurs to sell a share in their businesses .
Nineteen Nineteen Group was busy again last month with two transactions . They acquired 100 % of Lyrical Communications , organiser of the 300-exhibitor InstallerSHOW for the heat , water , air and energy sector . The show started out life in 2015 and has managed to increase revenue by 500 % since 2018 , primarily due to a move from the Ricoh Arena , Coventry to the NEC . The 15 strong team has joined Nineteen and the show will continue to be held as a standalone event .
Their second acquisition ( also 100 %) is the Drives and Controls Show . The show , which has 460 exhibitors , has been around for 30 years and will become part of Nineteen ’ s Manufacturing Expo cluster of events along with Smart Factory Expo ( acquired earlier this year ), Maintec ( acquired as part of the Western Exhibitions acquisition in 2018 ) and Design Engineering Expo ( which was a launch ). Drives and Controls is a biennial show but being part of the annual
08 — November