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Case Study

Entrepreneurship through acquisition: Sébastien Perroud and the IAR Group

By Benoit F. Leleux, Dominik Hanslin, Iuliia Mordacheva, Matthias Rey and Frank Schuster

16 pages

November 2024

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Reference: IMD-7-2515

GENEVA (SWITZERLAND), AUGUST 2021. There was a lot at stake for Sébastien. This was the culmination of his 18-month NCA supported search journey to find a company to acquire. Instead of a single target, he was now faced with the prospect of acquiring 4 separate companies at once, consolidating them into a group. One, SAS, was bigger than the others but also faced significant financial issues. Hopefully he had identified three additional companies as acquisition targets, all profitable and with low levels of debt but individually a bit too small. Should he pursue all three as a single deal or add SAS for a four-company deal? In a last-ditch effort to figure out the best deal configuration, he ran some simulations about the potential returns of the group with and without the SAS turnaround. With those projections in hand, it was time to finalize the management buy-in proposal to present to the investment committee the following week.

Learning Objective

What is a search fund and what are its purposes?
How to conduct a professional search for a company to acquire?
How to develop a convincing business case for a buy-and-build acquisition strategy?

Keywords

Entrepreneurship, Finance, Strategy, Search Fund, Acquisition, Buyout, Small and Medium-sized Enterprise, Mergers and Acquisitions, Private Equity

Settings

IAR Group, Finance and Insurance, Private Equity
2020-2023

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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