Acquisitions exceed record rates, congrats to...

Proxima Sales is experiencing an acquisition epidemic! It started as a trickle in the last half of 2015 and has now reached flood proportions. Proxima Sales clients are being acquired, and in some cases acquiring other companies, in record numbers.

Of course some of our clients have been acquired every year, for over a decade. Often these M&A deals develop for so-called “acqui-hiring” reasons – a nice way of saying the big company, Apple, Oracle, IBM, etc. bought the smaller, start-up or stable mid-stage company in order to acquire the time and talents of the engineers, developers, UI geniuses, etc. that came with the little dot com that built something cool. Great talent is hard to find and the big players have not been cheap when paying, what can add up to a million or more dollars per engineer, acquired in a full-scale company buy-out.

Other clients have been acquired because Big Red, Big Blue, Larry’s place, Hoodie land, etc. wanted the intellectual property that our client invented and then built out into a company. These acquisitions fall into two groups: acquire to fire, or acquire to admire and use.

Acquire to fire, our least favorite outcome happens when a bigger player sees a genuine threat to their market dominance from five guys and some awesome IP, and buys out the company so that the technology can’t make the big guy’s product look lame and behind the times. In other words, the acquiring company is committed to making sure the acquired IP does not see light of day nor further sales in the marketplace. We hate to see our clients say goodbye to the baby they built just so a big, big, player can ditch all of our client’s current customers, and bury the intellectual property in some vault. 

To be fair, when our clients face this outcome they are often so happy with their new bank account balances, that the loss of their intellectual baby is pretty much medicated with some really good Mai-Tai’s in Fiji or the Azores, and the ability to start another new company with a hefty cash cushion.

The other IP acquisition trend we’re seeing is Proxima Sales reviews of company clients bought so that their little piece of technology elegance can be integrated into the monolith of a Facebook, Instagram, etc. and give the big buyer a leapfrog in technology, access to a different vertical market, or features without having to spend the time and money to find engineers to build what our guys already built.

Really, we’re happy when our clients are happy. We build sales for companies that want to scale sales and getting acquired is one of the many rewards that can come from having real-live revenue and a robust sales pipeline. 

If you’re still an independent, privately-held tech firm that wants more sales, give Kate Parker at Proxima Sales call. We have a couple of openings for awesome solutions with teams that have had their favorite client acquired.