Twenty-eight years on both sides of the software purchase

Mandate

Set capital allocation and portfolio strategy after the founder became executive chair, grow in the United States without changing the decentralised model, and decide what head office should require of the businesses it owns.

Outcomes

• Led 86 acquisitions for C$1.21bn in 2021–2025; the 2021–2023 cohorts are tracking a 21 per cent after-tax return against an 18 per cent hurdle.
• Raised the US share of revenue from 19 to 36 per cent through 27 small acquisitions instead of a C$940m platform.
• Recommended and ran the sale of the hospitality group for C$212m in 2024, under written conditions for sale adopted by the board.
• Moved 36 of 41 public-sector businesses to shared Canadian hosting; the win rate on tenders requiring in-country records rose from 31 to 52 per cent.
• Introduced scope-based conversion pricing in the Civic group; services gross margin rose from 24 to 37 per cent in 2025.

Decisions in context

Gideon Asselstine created this role when he succeeded our founder as chief executive, partly to separate capital allocation from the day-to-day running of the groups. I hold corporate development across the company, the annual capital allocation plan, portfolio reviews and the small number of requirements head office places on our businesses. I chair the investment review for purchases between C$20 million and C$75 million and present larger ones, the cohort review and our record of declined deals to the board's investment committee. The defining decisions of the period have been choosing small US acquisitions over a platform, selling a group for the first time, making Canadian hosting mandatory and repricing conversion work as AI changed it. I am also a director of our US holding subsidiary. I am not a director of the listed company, and I attend board meetings only for the items I present.

Reason for the move

Current appointment.

Mandate

Run Sorrelgate's largest operating group, keep its general managers both autonomous and accountable, and continue acquiring in public-sector verticals.

Outcomes

• Grew revenue from C$190m to C$310m, with organic growth averaging 3.4 per cent a year.
• Completed 14 acquisitions for the group for C$168m.
• Lost C$11m of recurring revenue when a province consolidated its tribunal systems in 2019, which led directly to the buyer-map test.
• Led the response to a ransomware incident at one business in 2020, contained without loss of customer data, and started the hosting review.

Decisions in context

After nine years of buying businesses I asked to run some, because I suspected my acquisition models were missing what general managers knew. Lucien gave me the Civic group, then twenty-two businesses selling to municipalities, courts, tribunals and provincial agencies. My job was to set annual plans with each general manager, approve their smaller purchases, move capital between them and step in when a business was in trouble. I learnt how slowly a municipality replaces software, how one large contract can absorb a general manager's attention and how little a retention table says about a procurement decision taken above the customer. The tribunal consolidation in 2019 cost us C$11 million of recurring revenue and changed how we underwrite public-sector businesses. A ransomware incident in 2020 began the hosting work I later led as chief strategy officer.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief strategy officer when the new chief executive created the role.

Mandate

Build a corporate development function able to find and close acquisitions for every group without slowing the groups' own buying.

Outcomes

• Closed 41 acquisitions for about C$520m in five years.
• Introduced the three- and five-year cohort review of acquisition returns in 2013.
• Stopped buying in two verticals after the first cohort review showed returns well below the hurdle.
• Wrote the standard founder letter and the first diligence checklist used by all groups.

Decisions in context

When I took over corporate development, each group bought businesses its own way and the board saw acquisitions one at a time. I built a team of eight that could source and diligence purchases for any group while leaving smaller deals to the groups themselves, and I wrote the founder letter and diligence checklist that every group still uses in revised form. The work I value most from this period is the cohort review. Its first edition, in 2013, compared projected and realised returns for every acquisition since 2005 and showed that we had overpaid in two verticals by assuming growth those markets could not provide. Presenting it to Lucien and the investment committee was uncomfortable, and the decision to stop buying in both verticals cost us several deals we would otherwise have done. It made the hurdle something the board could test.

Reason for the move

Asked to run an operating group to take direct P&L responsibility.

Mandate

Find and buy small software businesses in Ontario and Quebec, and prepare the acquisition record needed for the listing.

Outcomes

• Bought 14 businesses for about C$85m.
• Prepared the acquisition history and business-unit financial summaries used in the 2009 listing prospectus.
• Built the first database of about 900 Canadian vertical software businesses as possible acquisitions.

Decisions in context

Lucien hired me after we met across a table: Ostrevale had considered selling him a records-software product line, and I had priced it. Sorrelgate then had twenty-three businesses and a habit of buying through the founder's personal network. My task was to widen that network without losing its character. I drove to founders' offices across Ontario and Quebec, many of them in small towns, and learnt to read a maintenance ledger, to find the customers who had not upgraded in years and to explain honestly what would change after a sale. I bought fourteen businesses in under four years, and spent much of 2008 and early 2009 assembling the acquisition history for the listing. The financial crisis lowered prices and made founders more willing to talk, and it taught me that our best years for buying were usually our worst years for confidence.

Reason for the move

Promoted to lead corporate development across the company.

Mandate

Bring discipline to bid pricing after two fixed-price contracts had lost money.

Outcomes

• Rebuilt the bid costing model so that every fixed-price bid carried a risk reserve approved by finance.
• Raised the win rate in competitions for pre-qualified supplier arrangements from 22 to 34 per cent.
• Recommended against bidding for three fixed-price contracts that the competitors who won them later reported as loss-making.
• Completed a part-time master's degree in public administration in 2006.

Decisions in context

Ostrevale built and ran case-management and records systems for public bodies, and it had recently lost money on two fixed-price contracts when I arrived. I rebuilt how it costed bids, insisted on a risk reserve that finance had to approve and learnt to read a request for proposals as a description of how a public body thinks rather than only what it wants. The work showed me the purchasing machinery behind every government contract: pre-qualified supplier lists, mandatory requirements, evaluation committees and calendars that move with budgets and elections. I watched a well-liked incumbent lose a ministry account because a contract vehicle was replaced, an event I would meet again at Sorrelgate. Studying public administration in the evenings helped me understand the officials across the table. By 2007 I wanted to own businesses rather than bid for work, and Lucien's offer came at the right moment.

Reason for the move

Recruited by Sorrelgate's founder to buy software businesses rather than sell services to governments.

Mandate

Build valuation models, prepare sale documents and support negotiations for technology clients.

Outcomes

• Worked on 19 completed sales, purchases and financings for software and IT services companies.
• Built the firm's first model valuing software businesses on their maintenance cash flows.
• Moved from growth-company financings to distressed sales after 2000 and promoted to associate in 2000.

Decisions in context

I joined Bellwyn two months after finishing my degree, at the height of enthusiasm for technology companies. For two years I built models for financings and sales that assumed growth few of the companies achieved. When valuations collapsed in 2000 and 2001, the firm's work turned to distressed sales and mergers of struggling software companies, and so did mine. That period taught me more than the boom. I saw that the software businesses that survived were usually small, dull and loved by a narrow set of customers who paid maintenance every year, and I built a valuation model around that cash rather than around growth. I also saw buyers wreck what they had paid for by integrating too quickly. By 2002 I wanted to understand customers from the inside, and a role pricing government bids in Ottawa offered exactly that.

Reason for the move

Wanted to work inside a company rather than advise on transactions, and to learn how public bodies buy technology.