In this session we explore the remarkable journey of a consulting firm that expanded from a small team of 12 to a robust organization of 250 employees over 14 years. Discover the strategic decisions, leadership principles, and innovative practices that fueled their growth and led to a successful exit. Join us as we delve into the challenges they faced, the lessons they learned, and the key factors behind their impressive transformation.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander:
Welcome everybody. This is Greg Alexander, the founder of Collective 54, and glad to have you all here on the podcast. For those that might be first-time listeners, this show is dedicated to founders of boutique professional services firms. We help you make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. On today’s episode, we have a Collective 54 alumni member, somebody who has been a member for a long time. We love having them in the community, and he’s made it to the other side. He’s gone cradle to grave and recently completed his exit. We have him with us today to tell us more about that journey. So with that, it’s good to see you, Ben. Would you please introduce yourself to the audience?
Benoit David:
Yeah, thank you very much, Greg, for having me. My name is Ben David. I was the CEO of Endeavor Consulting Group, which primarily served the life science industry in three different pillars: technical operation and enterprise systems, quality, and supply chain. It was a great journey to go through in the last few months, and I am certainly glad to talk to you.
Greg Alexander:
Yeah. So, you know, whenever I talk about somebody who has successfully exited, I always want to start with the origin story. So tell me how the firm was started. Tell me when you joined the firm and how long you guys were in business. What was the origin story?
Benoit David:
So, Greg, I could and should write a book about this to be very honest with you. I was originally working at Johnson, and there’s a great guy that I hired to help me with a global manufacturing execution program. I’ll try to make that story very short. This gentleman is Kevin Costello, and we became very good colleagues. At one point, he said, “Ben, I’m working for a company ABC, and it’s not really going well for me. Do you mind if I switch to my own company, Endeavor Consulting Group, and then I will continue to serve you under that new company?” So I helped him with this big mega company to switch, and he became a vendor of ours. We established a very good rapport, and in 2010, I decided, with all the reorg and dynamics of this business, to make the jump from the comfort of corporate America to join that small company, Endeavor Consulting Group. When I joined, we were probably around 12 employees, including four partners at that time. We grew this business to 250 people with a global footprint, working with many large corporations and offering services mostly in the life science industry. It ended up paying out very well. In 2018, my partners retired, and I became the CEO of the company. That’s around the time I got acquainted with you, Greg. Part of our business was growing. COVID came about in 2020, and our business boomed because of the vaccine. Our business peaked, and I said to my colleagues and partners, “This is the best time for us to exit.” That’s the journey where we started the process of learning about it, reshaping our business, and then putting it to market.
Greg Alexander:
What a fantastic story. From 2010 to 2024, from 12 people to 250 people, and a successful exit. Just a big congratulations to you and your partners. That’s an amazing journey. You should be very proud of yourself.
Benoit David:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was not without any sweat and hard conversations, I can tell you that. But yes, we did it with the courage and enthusiasm of everybody in the leadership team, which was not always easy.
Greg Alexander:
All right. Now, you hired a good friend of ours, Collective 54 member Rick Sappio, to be your exit concierge. So tell everybody what an exit concierge is and what did Rick do for you?
Benoit David:
Yeah. Obviously, we are very good at what we do, but we’re not good at exiting necessarily. So how do I find the best investment bank, the best legal firm, the best finance company to do an audit, and all the tricks in the bag on what to do, what not to do, where to say go, and where to say stop? That’s exactly what Rick ended up offering. Rick had a tremendous amount of experience and had done that himself. The beauty is Rick had a rich history, with good and bad experiences. When you mix all this, you bring a very rich baggage of knowledge with you. It’s not always a smooth journey. Rick introduced us to an investment bank in New York City, a legal firm, and a large firm for our quality of earnings, which he recommended. The quality of earnings was a phenomenal tool to bring strength, although it was very costly, and we had to do it twice. Rick helped us synchronize all these different groups to ensure we were all aiming for the same thing at the same time, in terms of timing and pricing strategy. For those who believe they know all about it, having Rick as a coach, giving us great directions and go/no-go decisions, was invaluable.
Greg Alexander:
Yeah. Now tell us a little bit about the process itself. So you hired an investment banker, which is great. We have a cat for that. Sounds like they did a good job, and their job was to bring potential buyers to you. So, how many people did they reach out to? How many people expressed interest?
Benoit David:
Yeah. So, the deal was, and again, with the exit concierge, for them to reach up to 200. I have to be very honest, and I don’t want to brag, but we ended up having too many companies beyond 200 reaching out to us just on a natural basis. And by the way, the company who purchased us never came from the banker; it came from us.
Greg Alexander:
When we…
Benoit David:
…forwarded it to the banker, they ended up being the company buying our schedule manager. But, yeah. So, we had to prepare a tremendous amount of information. And I recall at one point the conversation I think I had with you, Greg, that it’s like you’re being undressed to the point where you’re completely naked from the business standpoint. Every notch involved in every problem your company had or faced or may face, it’s all surfacing. So, that process is quite difficult because it also opened the door to who in your organization is really the lead individual versus who is not the lead individual, or second or third or fourth if I can say that. And people kind of see it now, right? You know what I mean? It’s kind of the picture of the company resurfacing. It’s not to say that the others are not good; it’s just that’s the nature of the beast. You know, there’s always a number one, number two, number three, number four in every team, right? Even in professional sports. So that really brings this up. And in some cases, it was sensitive.
Greg Alexander:
Okay. So we reached out to over 200 people and then a smaller number of those, quite a few though, expressed interest. So, how did you pick the one?
Benoit David:
Yeah. So we go through, interestingly, we have a very good process that this company that we used in New York. We had a good process to funnel it down. Obviously, the monetary figure is important but certainly the cultural adaptation, and what they intended to do and certainly what we were expected to do, to potentially partner with them. And we had strategic, we had strategic back or VC-backed strategic, or VCs and they all have different types of aspirations on what their exit would look like and all that. So as we moved forward, we could see some were just interested in our SAP business or IT business. They could care less about the rest. Some were more interested in the SAP portion of what we wanted to sell, the whole thing at once, right? So, the process ended up being really a match not necessarily just financially but a match with the culture. This company who came in, the way they presented themselves, the way that they were really providing kind of their vision of how they would see the integration, our contribution, and our participation. What it would look like. They had a very nice plan and it made us and made kind of our aspiration saying, hey, this is great because obviously they’re going to take care of employees and all that. And we felt more comfortable going in that direction than others and obviously the price ended up being part of it. And this was a strategic company. So obviously they came in a bit stronger than the others which helped us out.
Greg Alexander:
Yeah, you know, for those that might be embarking on this journey, you know, as they listen to this podcast and who have never been through it before, were there any surprises that came up along the way? Anything that you would advise people to pay attention to?
Benoit David:
Yeah. So we certainly have good finance but I think our finance was never to the degree that it needed to be for that type of exercise and have a true understanding of your beta. In my mind, it was kind of, I don’t want to call it a surprise, Greg, but there was so much focus on how we would construct our offering, the construct of our contract and how we would get in our beta and how we would harmonize this and how the payout people were so close to the finance that it’s almost at one point, it was during the process that they were more focused about the finance than what we were offering to the marketplace, right? So it was a little bit tricky for us but once we had our finance and honestly we hired temporarily a CFO to help us out because it was above our league right now. They were asking so many different questions and making so many different business models on how the finance could go and how the forecast would look like and all that. So, yes. In conclusion, the finance portion is to have it very strong. And the disadvantage of being very well detailed is it also revealed a lot of the reality of what the business and who runs it and who’s more successful than others. And it makes if you have multiple partners, it makes some folks indirectly uncomfortable, right? Then you’re not trying to do that, it’s just the mechanism makes it that you see who’s the number one, number two. And, I know I repeat myself a little bit but that’s really something that surfaced very strongly and they were seeing that.
Greg Alexander:
So I wanted to ask you about that because most of our members in Collective 54 are like you. And there’s partners, there’s more than one owner. That’s one of the reasons why these firms become successful and scale because scaling a firm is a lot of work. It’s usually too much work for one person. The problem is when you get to exit, if you get all these partners with different points of view, different perspectives, different thoughts on price and terms, etc. And getting everybody to agree on a deal is really hard. Did you guys experience that?
Benoit David:
So I’m first gonna say that… although we had differences, we had a means to get to consensus. Did we experience hardship? Greg? The word is too small and the reality if I step back, me personally, I would not redo a business with five partners. That’s clear in my head. Now, it does not reduce or minimize the value of those partners, to the business and to myself. But yes, it was at some point pushing a rope uphill and it was very difficult and, it was also extremely tiring while you were trying to maintain your business afloat and obviously economically each year don’t necessarily look alike. So years that are hard, you need to put more time. But then process is right in the middle of it. And people say where’s yourselves, how much did you sell? Where’s yourselves yesterday? And so, it was tough and we had to have probably this process brought the deepest most individual as a hard conversation than ever before because we had to close on things that we kept for too long which we should not. But these are things that you don’t realize until you get to this process and you try to kick the can but you can’t anymore. You have to really, take care of it. So, in short, Greg, it was a great journey. I’m very happy that we went through this. I think we did our best as five guys to go through all this, but it’s a redo lesson learned from me is I would not do another five partners business for sure.
Greg Alexander:
Okay. So just one more question because I know you got to go bad on, we really appreciate your time. So, so the deal closed. And now you’re on the other side, what is life like, you know, with a boss and working for another company? Well?
Benoit David:
Well, Greg, this is probably very interesting. I can’t see it’s the same for all five. So, so one retired took, the opportunity in my case, actually I’m about, to exit as well. I was just there to make sure that the transition occur properly in all the employees. The reality is, and with all the respect, there’s a great group called collective 54 that I’ve shared many information and heads up, which I don’t think I took those heads up seriously enough. But psychologically when you sell your business in my case was losing my child and my appetite to continue to work for another company and become a W2 is close to zero. So, so the reality is I stayed and I’m staying just for a few more weeks just to make sure that all the employees transitioned correctly. The, the company that I work with, is fully knowledgeable of my departure just because, you know, it’s just time for me to leave.
Greg Alexander:
Okay.
Benoit David:
And I’m doing that very happy by the way, I am, no, I’m glad because the company is in good hands. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to grow. But for me, my passion, is kind of shifting now.
Greg Alexander:
Well, then again we loved having you in the collective. You, you gave as much as you took, and, we could not be happier for you and your partners on what’s happened. And I wish you a wonderful retirement or whatever I, wherever life takes you next and you earned it, man. So.
Benoit David:
Yeah. Listen, I wanna highlight one aspect is that, if you group like this group, that you’re in what I recommend to everybody is don’t just listen do and trip on your own, get your knee bruised, you know, and all that. But that’s what we did. We, we took your input and you remember, I remember even call from one of your colleague. I, where are you leaving? Because now it’s time for me to practice.
Greg Alexander:
Yeah.
Benoit David:
And we did practice and it paid off and I say, it pays but you cannot just listen. You have to do right? And that’s kind of my, the way I work, I like to learn, but once I learn, I stop learning, I go do because learning some more when you don’t do you don’t really put in practice anything you learn? So in some a, and I think, your program enables you to do that learn pause, go execute, don’t try to gather more and more. And then once you execute and you know, and you understand, then you can add more to it’s kind of the crawl walk and run approach that I’ve been physically practicing myself for all my career and I felt that it was very valuable straightening our foundation. Greg. You don’t know how much I read about this and I listen and I call so many people within the group that’s what I did, I call pretty much many CEOS that you guys could put me in contact. And that helped me to establish. Okay here’s what we need to do to strengthen. And there was a key decision to enable us to go through that process.
Greg Alexander:
All right. Well, we’ve got to end it here. So I’m gonna speak directly to the audience here since we’re gonna say goodbye to Ben now. But, if you’re listening, to this podcast and we want to listen to more podcast like this, check out collective 54 prose podcast. Of course, you can read the book, the boutique, how to start scale and sell a professional services for him and know. And if you want to get involved in the community, like Ben had, I had done considered joining collective 54 and you can find us at collective 54 dot com. But again, Ben, thank you so much for being here and congratulations to you. And hopefully we can stay in touch.
Benoit David:
Absolutely. Take care. Good luck.
Note: This transcript was generated by Gong.