The short answer
Dean Tavener explains the strategy behind completing five acquisitions in 18 months, including how he identified and targeted businesses with aligned client bases.
Key takeaways
- How acquisition can accelerate your expansion strategy
- Dean’s approach to investigating an acquisition
- How to decide what type of takeover is the best for your business and ensure that the sale is mutually beneficial for the buyer, seller, clients, and employees.
- What you learn after 5 acquisitions – how to spot the red flags
Listen to the podcast
53 minWatch the full interview
About this episode
Ready to scale–fast? Buying and acquiring can help you grow your business empire in less than the time it takes to start from scratch–but definitely has some ups and downs.
Meet Dean Tavener–in the span of 18 months, Dean helped his team complete 5 acquisition transactions. Starting with a rough game plan--but leaving a lot of room for variables and growth–Dean went into buying and selling with fresh eyes and learned a lot along the way. Why leave room for variables? Well, Dean offers a lot of advice about the importance of examining your external environment and how these can take down your new asset.
Now kicking off a workplace feminine hygiene products business with his wife, Dean’s socially focused enterprise is determined to scale to a level where eco-friendly sanitary products are readily available for every worker in need. His exit plan? He doesn’t have one, but knows that it’s good to consider the inside aspects of your business each day so that you have less tidying to do when the time comes.
If you’re interested in learning more about the financial, legal, and human resources ramifications that come with buying and integrating in such a short amount of time, this episode is for you. From full company takeovers to client books alone, Dean has seen all of the ups, downs, and challenges that can come with taking on and merging multiple businesses into one.
Chapters
- 5:45How Dean planned for expansion through acquisition and came across opportunities to acquire. Hint: it had a lot to do with networking, good connections, and having good relationships with the people you know
- 11:05Why Dean believes that a potential acquisition deal falling through is a good thing–and what that means for your Due Diligence team
- 13:08The importance of keeping an open mind when investigating a potential business purchase, and knowing what’s really critical for you and what can live without
- 14:21How to decide what type of takeover is the best for your business and ensure that the sale is mutually beneficial for the buyer, seller, clients, and employees
- 16:55The game plan he used to approach acquisitions--and the strategies he didn’t. Knowing that you can’t control people, the environment, and external industry, Dean talks through the importance of recognising the need for gaps instead of trying to control every variable
- 29:20Some of Dean’s recommendations and reflections on communicating a business sale with staff and clients, and the critical importance of imparting the fundamentals that will affect them personally and their day-to-day
- 45:10How a seismic shift in recent socio-economic and cultural ideologies has him comfortably co-leading a menstruation and feminine hygiene company and why he believes gender is no longer an issue when discussing historically women’s issues
- 48:10His one best tip? Network. Dean recommends talking to people, helping one another, and helping someone else. Even though it might take a year or two for them to repay it, it often comes back around
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About Dean Tavener
Dean Tavener was the Head of Operations at Lifestyle Financial Services, and worked with the CEO to grow the business from eight staff to 26 staff, and to grow assets under management from around 450 million to now around about 1.78 billion dollars all in the span of 18 months, and this has been mostly through their acquisition focus.
Dean has dealt with issues that come through integration post completion, in a company that uses acquisition as a growth strategy. He also has a lot of interesting things to say about the targets and the strategy that’s behind it.
He is now the Co-founder and CEO of Pixii, a business that produces Australia’s most eco-friendly period products. They are a small team with big goals to improve the way workplaces approach gender equality and support their female staff.
Connect with Dean Tavener
About the show
Buy Grow Sell is hosted by Simon Bedard, founder and managing director of Exit Advisory Group, a boutique mergers and acquisitions advisory firm that helps Australian business owners value, prepare for and navigate a sale. Every conversation draws on real deals and the patterns behind them.
