Bluprintx – Skie acquisition: When an ex-musician meets an ex-footballer

The sale of Australian Salesforce specialist Skie to UK-based strategic digital transformation consultancy Bluprintx came about due to a mix of strategic, emotional, and operational reasons.

Skie was acquired by UK-based strategic digital transformation consultancy Bluprintx for $12.9 million (£6.2 million), ARN reported in late May, and was set to strengthen the consultancy’s global Salesforce capabilities and highlights its ambition to become a leading global consolidator across the Salesforce and Adobe ecosystems.

Skie co-founder and director Adam Troughear is one of is one of five founders, with all of them knowing the business was going to be acquired at some stage.

“At the time that we were getting ready to sell, we were still friends and we were like, ‘This has been a pretty good run, maybe we should start thinking about selling while we still like each other’,” he said.

“Business can be pretty brutal sometimes and so that was definitely one part of it.”

On a more practical and non-emotional level, the company has about 54 employees and generates around $10 million in revenue. Realistically, it was coming up against the next operational hurdle.

“In order to grow past that, there’s a whole bunch of structural change and different things that must happen in order to push past that,” he said.

Troughear explained he and his partners explored whether they wanted to “strap in and get that done” themselves, knowing it was “probably not going to be as profitable for a few years”, which could mean Skie might not be as attractive for an acquisition target.

The group decided it was time to find a buyer and make sure it was the “ideal home” for Skie, he said, adding that from a cultural perspective, going to one of the big four consultancy firms would be like “oil and water.”

“I was really looking for a smaller business that had lofty ambitions that, but also something that was a little bit smaller,” he said.

Troughear noted retaining Skie’s culture was a priority. He wanted the business to “help build the machine, rather than get swallowed up by the machine”.

Meanwhile, after retiring from football in 1993, Lee Hackett worked with several investment firms before partnering with the University of Liverpool to establish Blueprintx in 2016 and is now its CEO.

Nine years later and with the Skie acquisition, Blueprintx has about 200 employees and over 300 customers.

Immediate affinity

While the time zone difference between Australia and the UK isn’t ideal, Troughear said it’s something he can get over.

He said when he met the Bluprintx CEO, there was an immediate affinity between the two of them.

“He’s an ex-professional footballer [and] I’m an ex-professional musician,” he said. “We’ve both turned to this tech space.”

Troughear explained Bluprintx has good private equity backing from UK-based equity firm Palatine and an aggressive buy-and-build plan, which he loves.

“You’ve got to be aggressive in this market, otherwise you just get steamrolled, in my opinion,” he said. “That was really the thing … right from the very first phone call we had, it was myself and Ivan [Soltic], our solutions director and he has got a Liverpool jersey in the frame of this meeting, because he’s a big fan.

“Lee also has a big jersey behind him. The moment the cameras turned on, we started chatting [and] there was this instant connection. It just felt natural [and] right the entire time we spoke to him.”

Troughear said that was followed by a rigorous merger and acquisition (M&A) process.

“Work is full on and you’ve got to be mates to a degree,” he explained. “You have to be able to have an affinity and some trust with people.

“Beyond just the technology that we’re working on, and the fact that we’re in the same space, in my opinion, something a former boss would say ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

“I’ve always really lived by that; you have to have strategy. Don’t get me wrong, but your company culture is just everything. Especially for us, we’re a people business, literally … our product is people,”

Skie doesn’t have a fancy widget that its sells or a software-as-a-service product that’s got new features this year; its product is its people, reiterated Trougher.

“The weapon that we have to differentiate ourselves is our culture,” he said. “That affinity with the Liverpool jerseys the moment that video turned on is really important.

“That starts to build a foundation for us being able to create a great business and Lee was already building a great business, but it’s a great home for Skie to go to and to continue that journey.”

Shifting M&A priorities

The acquisition of Skie has added to the busy M&A landscape in Australia. While Troughear said while buy and merging has always been around, the reasons for them are changing.

“For us, Bluprintx has a vision to be a really comprehensive, … deep capability, all-of-front-office transformation house,” he noted. “It was really important for them to look at us because of our Salesforce capability and how it extends its front office in, for example, in the SAP space.”

What Troughear is seeing with other M&As is that businesses were previously gaining more people and having “bums in seats” or adding straightforward capability. Now, it’s more strategic.

“The thing that differentiates businesses that get acquired is that they need to have … some level of AI [artificial intelligence] point of view, AI capability …something to bring that flavour into the new business,” he explained.

“I’ve seen it a fair bit, even just with smaller companies, where they’ve just acquired [a] four- to six-man-band that are an AI and specialist data practice because it’s so important to have that point of view.”

According to Troughear, M&A isn’t going anywhere, but the reasoning behind it will have to be compelling and provide a comprehensive story with whole service offerings.

“I think that is a shift,” he said. “It’s more calculated and not just a raw numbers game.”

For Skie, the Bluprintx acquisition will help it access other capabilities and other platforms to provide comprehensive offerings, which is important in this technology growth industry, Troughear explained.

“We love partnering with other customers, other businesses and working with all of the different ISVs [independent software vendor] in the Salesforce ecosystem,” Troughear said. “Instead of fighting and scrapping over market share, we’re growing the pie.

“If we focused on growing the pie [and] growing our offerings [there’s] more value. As a result, individual market share and revenue grows as well.”

From music to tech

Skie is a world away from Troughear’s dreams of being a rockstar and a musician in his early 20s. He spent time in the US playing drums and touring before the global financial crisis hit and ended that chapter.

“I headed back to LA and hustled,” he said. “Not just playing drums, but recording music and doing all sorts of different things.

“I was doing a lot more recording and I got this idea. I wanted to make apps, specifically music plugins.”

The need to create plugins sent him back home to Australia where he would be able to learn how to code and make apps.

“I realised I’m not a coder but I could understand and I could deal with people,” he said. “I could understand a problem and I had enough knowledge of technology to think about how [it] could solve a problem.

“Whereas some of these guys that were in this [coding] class were brilliant, but they couldn’t necessarily connect the dots like I could [and] that started my journey.”