Supporting innovation and growth for Australia’s SMEs through relationship banking with Judo Bank’s Grant Erskine and Ben Tuszynski

This year, the Australian EtA and Search Fund community is looking forward to its first big event for the region. The EtA Forum (www.etaforum.com.au) will be held in Manly Beach in Sydney, on Friday 16th September.

On this episode of The Next Step podcast, I speak to Grant and Ben from Judo bank. Judo has kindly offered to sponsor the ETA Forum, which is coming up next month in Manly. And it's exciting to have an opportunity to chat to them because I get their perspective on what they're seeing in the SME market, both in terms of acquisitions, debt funding and overall business operations in 2022.

Judo was founded only about five years ago, and has grown rapidly into this market space which was effectively under loved by the bigger banks in the Australian market and they're providing a really bespoke approach to SME lending and cashflow lending, which is critical to the success of Search Funds and EtA in this marketplace. Without that debt package, it's almost impossible to make the search acquisitions and the search businesses work as investments and be successful for their operators.

We're looking forward to seeing them and their team at the EtA Forum in September. Please stay tuned as we count down the days and be sure to yell out if you have any questions or comments to offer, so we can make the EtA Forum a great event for all involved.

www.etaforum.com.au

Connect with Pete : https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteseligman/

Connect with Grant : https://www.linkedin.com/in/grant-erskine-9ba38a24/

Connect with Ben : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-tuszynski-96746912/

Learn more about Judo Bank : https://www.judo.bank/

What we discussed:

03:13 Ben tells us what’s new at Judo and what they are seeing in the market.

09:40 Ben and Grant discuss the SME market in Australia and what is the most common thread amongst this customer base.

13:34 Ben & Grant give us their perspective on acquisition funding of businesses that are in the small to medium size.

19:35 Grant talks about what he’s learned so far about search that makes it a good fit for a bank like Judo, and tells us about the characteristics of the model that resonate with him.

27:76 Grant & Ben tell us about their partnership with the EtA Forum.

Quotes:

But we always had the end goal in sight, which was really to build a business that became or was on its pathway anyway to becoming Australia's most trusted SME bank. . And that's what it's really all about, is servicing those SME customers, who just don't get the love from our competitors in the market.

The most important thing to us is who we lend our money to. It's that resilience piece, that is the most common thread that we see across this customer base.

And there's also a significant amount of innovation that you see in the SME market. And what we find is, small to medium sized businesses are able to innovate, and then eventually one day they might get bought out by a large corporate.

But actually come and talk to us, and we'll discuss how we might be able to structure something up that works for everybody. And I think that's one of our advantages.

We think SMEs are the lifeblood of this, not just the Australian economy, but also for innovation and growth, which we're really excited to support.

Over the last 12 to 24 months, and everyone's been speaking about this for probably years, if not a decade, is this transition of baby boomers out of their businesses into whether retirement or semi retirement and the need for this transition of wealth to happen.

So we're seeing a community rather than an individual by a business, and the ideas and networks in order to bring that business to success, and then just the quality of information and analysis that sits behind the deal.

There's no cookie cutter approach to this part of the market. And I think it's such a key thing that needs to be understood by a bank or banker is that you need to really take a bespoke approach to every single transaction because the searcher will be different.

We're not plugging it into an algorithm to let the computer make a decision for us. We're putting highly experienced bankers in front of our customers, or brokers or whatever it might be, to ask the right questions, get hopefully good answers, and then make a decision.

There's going to be lots of really good businesses whose ownership lifecycles are coming to the end. And they're about to be bought out by these great entrepreneurs that are going to take their business to the next level. So we're really just really excited to go meet and support the ecosystem that's been built out.