The growth of EtA in Australasia and the coming of age of Search Funds as a mainstream asset class, with Tim Moore, Director at Dorado Property and Do...

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 of the next step, I speak to Tim Moore, who is the Director of Dorado capital. Tim originally was a self funded searcher back in the early 2000s. And then after exiting the business that he originally bought, has then moved on to invest in a range of activities, including property infrastructure and small business. More recently, he's been an active investor in the search fund market in Australia and also internationally.

Recently, Dorado also raised the first Australian funds focused on search funds, and they raised $10 million with capital and have already deployed a proportion of that over the last 12 months.

At the EtA Forum in September, Tim is going to deliver the keynote speech in which he will provide an update on the state of play of Search in Australia and New Zealand, giving us his perspective as an active investor in the marketplace and what he sees now and into the future.

I had a great time catching up with Tim, to learn a bit about what he's been up to in the last couple of months and have a chat about what we each expect everyone to be able to get from the day we spend together at the EtA Forum in a couple of weeks time.

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 Tim : https://www.linkedin.com/in/tcsmoore/

What we discussed:

03:23 Tim tells us what he has been seeing in the search market recently.

06:32 Pete asks Tim where he sees the balance struck at the moment between investments, investors available to fund and entrepreneurs available to execute.

10:21 Tim discusses what he is seeing in relation to new entrepreneurs that might be coming to market in the next few months.

14:19 Tim gives his take from an investor lens on what more can be done in the Australian market to make sure that there is domestic support.

18:58 Tim tells us what we can expect from his session at the EtA Forum and what he hopes will be the key takeaways.

Quotes:

I think things have progressed so much in the last two years, the last year, that it's a great cause for optimism. But the reality is, this is still a very fledgling asset class. And there's a long journey to go.

It'll be a long time before we do start to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of businesses available to buy. It feels like there's still a long way to go there.

The investor market domestically here was struggling to keep up because there just wasn't the knowledge about the asset class or the appetite, really. Whereas now I feel like we've got quite a buoyant domestic investor group that's keen to try and find searchers to back.

If you think about the period, not very long ago, when some of those people were raising money, they were going and sitting down with family offices who were licking their chops, having had venture cap funds, and share market portfolios performing like rocket ships, and congratulating themselves about how smart they were. A lot of that's changed.

I think that we're starting to have the pandemic move slightly into the rearview mirror. You either get started now and have a good crack at it before Christmas. But if you really don't get your act together in the next month or two, don't waste your time in November, December, because you probably won't get anyone's attention.

If you don't want to Big C suite job in a big major organization, if you're not walking into a major family business your family owns, and if the whole VC tech world sounds a bit risky, search is the absolutely logical place for you to hit.