A food company had the vision that consolidating small ‘mom and pop’ health food brands under our holding company umbrella was a winning strategy.   Cool beans, as they say…good idea.  But we had almost no money.  To solve the important problem of having little financial capital, we identified and negotiated to buy two small companies for some cash and mostly stock in our holding company.  But we needed that to be equity in a public company.  We then convinced a small investment bank to underwrite a $4 million IPO that enabled us to buy the two companies and have some operating cash left over.

Immediately after the IPO, we learned that a large food manufacturer wanted to sell their line of health food products which they considered non-core to their strategy.  We knew this could be a huge leap forward for us.  But we had tangible net worth of under $1 million.  With the help of a fantastic M&A banking team, we raised $40 million in a combination of equity and debt to complete a transaction that increased our revenue 10-fold and our earnings nearly 20-fold. 

Several years and dozens of acquisitions later, the company had both revenue and market capitalization of more than $2 billion.