JMG Group’s Post

Transcript

I'm John Lacey. I'm from Butterworth Spengler Insurance Group. We decided to sell the business, it was a succession plan. We always knew at some point, it was a family owned business, and the Spengler family are going to want to exit. So we had that in our plans. We just need to choose a good quality partner that would suit us now and in the future. We spoke to quite a few suitors and at the time JMG was just doing a deal with Synova. It was quite new and quite fresh and we just felt it was something new that we could hook into. And when we spoke to Tim Johnson and Nick Houghton, we really got the impression we were on the same wavelength. They understood that we wanted to grow. They understood how much have we put into the business and they were able to provide the resource and take a lot of the noise away from us, which was stopping us from growing. The sales process was quite difficult because we did it right in the middle of COVID. But we had JMG's support, so the acquisition team there, the likes of Tim Philip, they really helped us out. They talked us through it and we've never gone through this. We had no experience what to expect. So we spoke to some of our peers and they told us the pitfalls. But dealing with the JMG acquisition team just made it so much simpler for us. The JMG team were fantastic. Without them I'm not sure we could have done it. As I said, we have not had any experience and we did it quite short notice, but Tim Philip was absolutely fantastic and really held our hand through the whole process. It was in the middle of covid. We had nice big plans for what to do, but by the time it had gone through and the other partners had left and we just sort of went off on our own ways, unfortunately. Post completion we are over the moon with it. Everything that JMG promised, they delivered and more. So the biggest part really for us was being able to grow the business and we had too much of the back office stuff to be doing which didn't really enable us to concentrate on growing the business or buying other companies. JMG have taken all that away - the human resources, the compliance side of things, doing the due diligence when you buy companies. They took all that way and what it meant is that with the noise gone, we can concentrate on creating good quality staff and providing good service. And growing the company, something we've always wanted to do, we just didn't have the capacity to be able to do as much as we wanted. We've got some big plans. We've grown quite slow. We've got some nice clients coming on board, but we're still looking to grow via mergers and acquisitions. So we're speaking to a couple of good companies and I want to put those on the books over the next few months. Look for the long term, choose a partner you can work with that suit your needs now and in the future. And really don't jump to the financial aspects. The finances there, they're quite similar in certain deals. Choose a deal that you've constructed to suit you and your shareholders for the future, not just now. We couldn't have done the growth that we've done without the JMG support.