The Flavours of Search : What flavour of EtA might suit you as an Entrepreneur or an Investor? With Rob Gaunt, CEO of ACE Training

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.

In this episode I speak with Rob Gaunt, CEO of ACE Training. Rob started his career selling photocopiers and worked his way up to COO. He then obtained an MBA at Macquarie Graduate School of Management before launching his search for a company to acquire in partnership with SMEVentures, a platform for search funds in Australia.

At the EtA Forum next month, Rob is hosting a panel that will focus on the various “flavours” of EtA that are available to both Entrepreneurs and Investors alike. He will have representatives from a few common models and another from a novel approach to the task. It should be a really interesting session that provides an opportunity for the audience to hear directly from people who have walked each path and learn more about the structure that could suit them best.

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.

Tickets available at: www.etaforum.com.au

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

Connect with Rob : https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-gaunt/

What we discussed:

03:49 Rob tells us how things are going at ACE Training a year into the acquisition

08:24 Rob discusses the approach to the panel session “The Flavours of Search” coming up at the EtA Forum

15:35 Pete & Rob talk about what may influence an investor's decision around the structure they follow

17:30 Rob discusses why a certain model may resonate with an investor more than another

18:48 Pete & Rob tell us what the Search community can expect from the EtA Forum in September

Quotes:

The big shiny thing that everyone wants to chase is growth and how do we scale this but sometimes the real value is in setting that foundation first. So you've got that springboard to then go and achieve what you want to do.

There is no right or wrong way to do this. There are just different ways and people's strengths and backgrounds match up to different components of that.

It's not only what structure do I think might suit me, but it's also what structure might suit me in this market as opposed to next year's market?

Inevitably, everyone wants to know, how did you raise the capital? It's the first question every searcher asked. And it is, in my view, absolutely, the wrong question to be asking If you've got a good idea, or you've got a good kind of approach, the capital will come.

I think that the most important part of this is understanding why you gravitate towards one of these different models. And irrespective of the one that you choose, how are you looking to support yourself through that process, and, you know, each model has slightly different components to it. And you need to fill those in in different ways.

Someone who really understands their core capabilities and the way that they want to go about it, it's going to stand out from someone who hasn't done that work.

We all looked at the problem differently. And we all got elements of it wrong. And we learned more from what we got wrong, than what we got right.

It's nice for us to be able to have this type of conversation in a public forum and say, hey, you know, here are some of the things that we learned and answer some of those questions. It's fantastic to see the model doing so well in Australia. I feel very lucky to be part of it.