Jenny Morel
2 min readJul 29, 2024

MORGO workshop: The Hunter or the Prey?

Are you planning to sell your company? Simply assume it will be sold one day? What will you do then? Have you thought about it? Or have you thought about being the Hunter not the Prey and growing by acquisition?

Most companies are sold, whether it is planned or not. A few grow significantly by buying other companies.

How would you become the Hunter instead of the Prey? Do you need to list first? Listing makes acquisitions easier — you can pay with shares in the company as well as cash, and there is much faster access to more funds through a rights issue.

What journey are you on?

The theme for MORGO 2024 in Queenstown is ‘What journey are you on?’ The Hunter or the Prey workshop is a chance to role-play the sale and acquisition of a company.

There will be plenty of people with first hand knowledge on hand to help with this:

  • Grant and Merryn Straker have grown Straker Translations by acquisition since listing on the ASX;
  • Aaron McDonald of Futureverse rolled up 12 companies into one — in one year!
  • Hadleigh Ford of SwipedOn has sold his company twice and he’ll probably sell it again (listen to his Morgo Podcast);
  • Our Morgo Partners; Growthpoint Technology Partners, Anthony Harper and RSM.

MORGO attendees will be divided into acquiring or selling teams. After some prep time, the teams will negotiate. And then we all compare the deals struck. Simple!

And fun.

Plus a whole lot of direct learning to be had.

Never as easy as it sounds

Note that we said “a company”. There will be one company to be acquired.

The acquirors can decide what they are: a large company adding a feature through this acquisition, a peer company seeing this as a good addition for extending its reach, a PE firm that is buying to sell again in a few years’ time, a listed company that can offer scrip …

As you are starting to see this is never as straight forward as it sounds — let the learning begin.

Register here for MORGO 2024, the Hunter and Prey workshop plus a whole lot more.

#morgo #nztech #nzbusiness #scaleups

Jenny Morel
Jenny Morel

Written by Jenny Morel

In the Morgo Podcast, Jenny interviews people building Australian & NZ tech companies into the world, & runs Morgo events for these CEOs. Previously a VC..

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