Bridgepointe 'Certainly' Looking to Buy Partners as Part of Investment
Charlesbank Capital Partners announced a growth investment of more than $100 million into the firm last week.
![Payout Payout](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt3554dcb5b2e209dd/6524302b51b6a57fa2b16da4/Payout.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Shutterstock
Channel Futures: When you were meeting with them, did you have a list of things you were looking for? Deal breakers? Requirements?
Bridgepointe’s Scott Evars: The first thing is, I’ve had a business partner for 20 years. The thought of bringing on a new one was something that we took very seriously. The very first thing was our culture. It’s super important. It was critical to making sure that they bought into our mission and culture, and they wanted to help that grow. The second thing is taking care of the people that helped us get here, which are our agents and our employees. It’s been a great growth story for 20 years, and we wanted to make sure we lifted them up while we took care of our customers and supplier partners. Those were the top things that we were looking for.
Obviously, you’ve got to check the box. We’re doing it to grow. It’s a growth story. Charlesbank has a phenomenal record of helping technology companies grow. So they ticked the box there, but they also ticked the box as a partner in our interaction with them. We spent a lot of time going through that, and feel really good about it.
CF: Going forward, what does that partnership look like? Is it threefold you, Brian [Miller] and Charlesbank in terms of leadership?
SE: I’d say me, Brian and our management team were a big part of us deciding to go the route of a capital partner. We could have just continued on our own; we have a very successful business. But we and the management team driving the bus was a big part of our criteria as well — to continue our model. Because we feel like we have a great team, and we’ve had a track record of that. So it’s really us, our management team and then a few members of the Charlesbank team that will be [leading], but day-to-day it will be it will be me, Brian and the management team. We’re fully committed, inspired by the opportunity and really looking forward to the next phase of our growth.
CF: Your announcement mentioned “key personnel hires.” Are there any particular areas where you’re looking to expand your staff?
SE: We are a customer-facing organization. You can never have enough talent that can can sit in front of a customer, understand what the requirements are and come back with our best two or three ideas to help them fulfill that requirement. So that sales engineering talent and sales leadership talent. We’ll be going on a recruiting binge across the country to continue our organic growth that way. We’ll obviously also be doing some enhancements to our tools – integrating our tools, adding to our tools – which will require more talent, both on the technical side but also on the visionary side. And then more back office. I feel really good about our back-office commissions operations just improving across the board. My sense is we’ll probably triple our staff in the next year or two to support the upcoming growth. Then finally M&A. We’ll be bringing on a team of people to help us evaluate, do due diligence and integrate any company that we decide is a fit for our culture and our vision.
CF: You bought Clover Communications more than a year ago. What were you looking for then? Would you say you’re looking for similar things now? What kind of company fits the profile?
SE: First off, Clover was a perfect fit, and a little over a year later, I can still say they are a perfect fit across the board. First, from a culture perspective. Customer-facing, experts in the space, great IT strategists and business people, and people that you would want to be with. Culturally, they fit in great. The second thing is, at the time we were heavily concentrated in California and on the West Coast. [Clover] gave us a fantastic footprint in the Northeast. It’s been an amazing partnership, because we brought on a number of new strategists, and the thesis has worked. Meaning, they’re focusing predominantly on sales and some operations at the field level but we’ve taken all the back office – marketing, accounting, finance, HR, legal, supplier management – off their plate. They’re doing phenomenally well on the sales side. That’s really what we’re looking for: a culture fit as well as geographic dispersion outside of our current areas and people that want to grow. We’re very interested in growing, and we’re interested in customer-facing companies that have gas in the tank and want to continue growing in the mid-enterprise and large enterprise space.
CF: If we were to kind of break them into categories, would that be a regional technology solutions brokerage [aka master agent]?
SE: We’re not going to limit ourselves to anybody, but I would say the bulk of our focus in the near-term would be on regional [technology services brokerages]. That’s a pretty broad definition, when you sit back and think about it. There are two to four people who are doing really well and have built a really nice business over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years that are exactly what we talked about. They might have a few direct contracts, but they’re in front of customers. They do a fantastic job serving those customers. They’re just embedded in a market. And we see there are a lot of those around the country that are very interesting to us. We will look at some different companies that might have some technologies that are interesting for us. Perhaps some customer-facing things that we either build or acquire. It’s super exciting. M&A is certainly something that will be part of the investment that we’re looking for.
CF: How has Bridgepointe evolved over the years? How has its business model changed?
SE: It started with me and Brian sitting back-to-back in a really small room with our analog phones from home. Slowly, over a period of time, we created a model where people came and worked under us. Similar to today, we went out with them and helped them monetize their relationships. Obviously, over time we’ve gone from selling data center and switched long distance and frame relay to MPLS, more data center and bigger IP pipes, if you will. Now we’ve obviously evolved with the times, still continuing to sell a lot of data center, a lot of IP and have moved to the cloud.
The big boon for us was when we started bringing people on. Growing the business, building out our team, and then bringing on more customer-facing sales talent, starting with our first engineer, Mike Pereira, about eight years ago. We’ve been bringing on more and more engineers over time to help us not only evaluate what customers need and fulfill those needs for them, but also figuring out what technologies we should bring into the portfolio to help our strategists sell more. When we started 20 years ago, we didn’t realize that the cloud was going to come our way and fit our model perfectly. For all of us that’s been a big boon. We’ve got the people, the process and the technology to help our customers make those decisions.
CF: I’d love to get your take on what we’re seeing elsewhere in the industry. We’ve seen private equity come into Upstack, Telarus and Avant. What’s going on in the industry, and where does Bridgepointe fit within that?
SE: It’s been exciting. The first thing that I’d say is, not only is it a huge market right now, but I think it’s only going to get bigger. There’ll be more money that comes to this space, and there will be more talent that comes to our space. And that’s both agents (IT strategists, as we call them) and new technologies. It’s just inevitable, because our model suits it so well, and it’s the way customers want to consume. I look at us as unique in the sense that we are customer-facing. Our brand is customer-facing, our company is customer facing and we start at the customer. And we’ve got a 20-year track record of growth in doing that. Everyone you mentioned there is a friend of mine. I think all of their models are different. But as it relates to having the track record, having the team, bringing on new resources, having new tools, having some unique acquisitions and expansion across the country, I really like where we sit, especially in the mid- and large enterprise space.
CF: Anything else you want to add?
SE: I think the other thing that we’re going to focus on is going wider within our customers and providing more value to our customers. Making sure that our back office improves via people and technology to help customers renew, upgrade, cross-sell, upsell and get them the latest technology. We couldn’t be more excited about the future in the channel and the plan and team we have at Bridgepointe and now we have capital to spend too.
CF: Anything else you want to add?
SE: I think the other thing that we’re going to focus on is going wider within our customers and providing more value to our customers. Making sure that our back office improves via people and technology to help customers renew, upgrade, cross-sell, upsell and get them the latest technology. We couldn’t be more excited about the future in the channel and the plan and team we have at Bridgepointe and now we have capital to spend too.
Bridgepointe Technologies will grow its staff and pursue acquisitions thanks to its recent private equity funding.
The California-based IT strategy firm last week announced a $100 million-plus growth investment from Charlesbank Capital Partners. As a result, 20-year-old Bridgepointe will most likely triple its staff in the upcoming two years, according to co-founder Scott Evars.
Moreover, Evars said Bridgepointe will evaluate regional TSBs and other partners who bring diverse geographic footprint and a growth mindset.
Keep up with the latest channel-impacting mergers and acquisitions in our M&A roundup. Then check out what we thought were the biggest mergers and acquisitions of 2021! |
Evars spoke to Channel Futures in depth about Bridgepointe’s expansion plans. We have edited the transcript for length and clarity.
Channel Futures: How did you find Charlesbank?
Bridgepointe Technologies’ Scott Evars
Scott Evars: As you know, there’s been a ton of investment activity, starting all the way back with [ScanSource buying] Intelisys. That has steadily ramped up over the last year or so. Having done this for 20 years on our own, we started accepting more calls. We hadn’t really accepted calls for a period of time. Charlesbank, along with a few others, reached out to us. And we started having meetings with them in the late spring. We kind of hit the pause button on our conversations and hired the investment banking firm Q Advisors out of Denver. We got a little bit more disciplined around exactly what our pitch was and went through quality of earnings. Ultimately we ran a process and then selected Charlesbank, whom we were talking to six months prior.
The main thing with Charlesbank is that from the beginning it was obvious that they spent a lot of time understanding our space and, more specifically, us. Ultimately, they are firm believers in our model, mission and vision of starting at the customer. That’s our mission and vision; to be with our IT strategists in front of mid- and large enterprise customers to help them make the best IT decision for their company. And Charlesbank were the ones who are most interested in that model, but also believed in the acceleration of that and the total addressable market opportunity that’s out there.
Scroll through our slideshow above for the rest of the Q&A, including Evars’ take on expanding his staff; plus, how Bridgepointe Technologies has evolved over the years and what he thinks of all of the private equity entering the channel.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email James Anderson or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
Read more about:
AgentsAbout the Author(s)
You May Also Like