How pricing government bids taught me to buy software companies

I grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, in a French-speaking household where the monthly accounts were done at the kitchen table by my mother, who kept the books for three small building contractors. What I took from watching her was not arithmetic. It was that a small business is usually one person's knowledge of its customers, and that the knowledge walks out of the door when that person does. I have spent most of my career buying businesses of exactly that kind, and the observation has not stopped being useful.

I studied commerce at Université Champvert in Ottawa, finishing in 1998, and joined Bellwyn Merchant Partners in Toronto that July as an analyst in its technology mergers practice. The late 1990s were an unusual school. Many of the companies we advised were valued on growth that never arrived, and when technology shares collapsed in 2000 and 2001, I spent more time on distressed sales than on flotations. I learnt to value a business from the cash it had already collected rather than the plan its founder believed in. I also saw how often a buyer's integration plan destroyed what it had paid for.

In April 2002 I moved back to Ottawa and to Ostrevale Public Systems, an integrator that built and ran case-management and records systems for federal departments and provincial agencies. I priced its bids, first as a manager and from 2005 as director of public-sector pricing. Bid work taught me how governments buy: through lists of pre-qualified suppliers, mandatory requirements scored before price, contract terms that outlast the officials who wrote them, and procurement calendars more predictable than the customer's own needs. It also taught me that a public customer's loyalty is often loyalty to a contract vehicle, and that when the vehicle changes the loyalty can vanish in one tender. I completed a part-time master's degree in public administration at the Fennimore School of Public Administration in 2006, mainly to understand the people across the table.

I joined Sorrelgate in June 2007 as director of acquisitions. The company was eight years old, owned twenty-three businesses and was preparing to list. Lucien Archambeau, its founder, had a simple model: buy small software companies serving narrow markets, pay from cash flow, leave them largely alone and never sell. He wrote that last promise into every letter to a founder. For four years I carried it into kitchens and boardrooms across Ontario and Quebec, and bought fourteen businesses, most for less than C$8 million. I learnt to read a maintenance ledger, to ask which customers had not upgraded in a decade and to tell a founder honestly what would change after the sale.

From 2011 I led corporate development across the company, and we completed forty-one acquisitions in five years for about C$520 million. I also introduced the practice I am probably best known for inside Sorrelgate: a cohort review that compares every acquisition, three and five years after closing, with the return we projected when we approved it. The first review, in 2013, showed that our purchases in two verticals had returned well below our hurdle because we had paid for growth those markets could not supply. We stopped buying in both. Nobody enjoyed reading that paper, and it is still the one I am proudest of.

In 2016 I asked to run something. Lucien made me president of the Civic group, then twenty-two businesses selling permitting, licensing, court and records software to public bodies, with revenue of C$190 million. Over nearly five years I learnt what my own acquisition models had assumed away: how long a municipality takes to replace software, how a single provincial contract can consume a general manager's year, and how fragile a business is when one procurement decision can remove a fifth of its revenue. We lost exactly such a contract in 2019, when a province consolidated its tribunal systems under one integrator. By 2020 the group had thirty-four businesses and C$310 million of revenue, and I understood much better what a decentralised owner owes the people it leaves alone.

I became chief strategy officer in January 2021, two years after Lucien handed the chief executive role to Gideon Asselstine and became executive chair. The role holds corporate development and the questions nobody else owns: capital allocation, portfolio review, how we grow in the United States, when we sell and what head office should require of businesses we have promised to leave alone. Since then we have bought eighty-six businesses for C$1.21 billion, sold our hospitality group, built shared Canadian hosting for our public-sector businesses and changed how we price implementation work.

I have a habit of putting disagreements on paper. Every acquisition above C$20 million reaches our investment review with the dissenting view attached and signed, and our board receives the cohort review in full, including purchases I sponsored that have disappointed. Colleagues would say I am slow to approve a deal and quick to ask what we will do when it goes wrong, and that I prefer a written rule to a clever exception. I would add that I change my mind more often than that reputation suggests, usually because a general manager closer to the customer turned out to be right.

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