Johan Lambert

Transcript

I am Johan Lambert, CEO of Target 2 Sell, and I have the pleasure of collaborating with IPTP as part of our acquisition process, which ended successfully since we concluded our M&A process with a buyout by Miracle, a wonderful French company. It's a long and complex process. There are actually two major phases - there's the long phase which is preparatory work, work that absolutely must be done upstream of any contact. This involves work on company valuation, meaning how we can have expectations about the company's valuation that are based on something logically and globally accepted by the industry. There's also work with investors, particularly on structuring a potential deal. You obviously have the possibility to do a classic cash deal, but you can also have a stock deal. Will this stock deal be acceptable to the various parties who will have a say and who can either accept or block the deal? Then the second phase is more compact - it's when a buyer presents themselves. At this point, there's very intense work that needs to be done. Pretty quickly, you'll have many questions, and while at first you might think it's business as usual, it can quickly get into quite a detailed level, so you need support on super important points like tools and infrastructure. When you start advanced due diligence, you might have to handle hundreds or even thousands of questions within a month or a month and a half. You need tools to manage this, you need a process, and you also need people who bring a sense of calm - because when you're faced with questions, it can lead to very high stress levels, and you might wonder why these questions are being asked, and you can lose a lot of energy just trying to understand what's happening. So they come with expertise and experience - this experience is absolutely crucial. These are teams who have both process expertise, who really understand the processes, who know the French market, they have technical expertise, and they have an extremely efficient back office. But I think something that I found very, very important is indeed this experience of having handled numerous cases before us, of knowing exactly how the process will unfold, and sometimes being able to defuse moments that can be extremely stressful. There are many things to negotiate in an acquisition - obviously you immediately think about price and structure, but it's not just that. It all materializes in a contract, and there are many highly technical clauses in a contract from both financial and M&A perspectives. And so I think IPTP was also very involved in the case, I think it's an intense phase, the investment bank's commitment also needs to be intense, we need to be able to count on them during this time. And we really were able to rely on IPTP, I would say completely, during this period. The partners who accompanied us were present, they mobilized their back office during this period to ensure we had all the support we needed, as we were a healthy company and wanted to engage in an industrial project, we wanted the product to continue, we wanted the teams to continue, it was essential for us, we wanted to find a company that had a culture similar to ours, and that's exactly what we found. There's a real industrial project, a real commercial project, the teams have joined Miracle's teams in their entirety, including myself, and so we're in our new family.