Deals Down Under

If you have bought a business, and are open to sharing your story on the show, please email [email protected]

If you want to sell your business, I'm buying. Please email [email protected]

Connect with Paige Kohalmont here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paige-kohalmont/

Paige Kohalmont had an operations career, an MBA, and no interest in starting a business from scratch. So in January 2022 she did something almost nobody in Australia was doing: she raised $500K from 18 investors and went searching for a business to buy and run herself. That's a search fund.

Two months in, a broker called with a deal. It took until April 2023 to get the keys to Austral Herbs, a dried botanicals importer with 550+ products from around 30 countries. Along the way a big four bank changed its terms at the last minute, forcing a pivot to a non-bank lender, and Paige moved her young family to a tiny regional NSW town to run the business on site.

Paige walks through the real mechanics: how 52 part-time interns screened 1,200+ businesses, how she staged due diligence to limit cash at risk, how the cap table works when not every investor funds the acquisition, and what happened after she took over. If the US playbook of SBA loans doesn't apply to you, this one is for you.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• 52 interns screened 1,200+ businesses, yet the deal came from a broker
• Raising $500K from 18 investors before she'd picked an industry
• The staged due diligence that kept her cash at risk low
• When a big four bank changes the deal at the 11th hour
• Where $500K of search capital actually goes (it's not the search)
• Moving a toddler to a remote town to run a business with zero documented processes
• It took 18 B-doubles to move the stock
• From no KPIs to tracking 64 a week

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - From her mum's business to an MBA and search funds

2:20 - Why she searched with no industry or location limits

4:08 - The "traditional" search fund criteria

6:03 - Talking to investors before you've decided to search

8:04 - 18 investors and the advisors she gathered along the way

9:50 - Building the HubSpot funnel and outreach system

11:41 - How 52 interns were recruited and managed

14:45 - 1,200 businesses contacted, but a broker found the deal

16:16 - Nobody understood search funds: convincing brokers and sellers

18:37 - February 2022 to April 2023: the long road to completion

20:27 - What Austral Herbs actually does

23:09 - Staging due diligence to limit cash at risk

27:18 - The cap table: investors who don't fund the acquisition

29:18 - Choosing advisors and keeping investors updated

31:37 - Where $500K of search capital actually goes

33:23 - Big four bank vs non-bank debt in Australia

37:11 - Moving the family to run the business on site

38:58 - Inheriting a business with no processes documented

42:07 - Relocating the business to the Central Coast

47:39 - Growth, systems and tracking 64 KPIs

51:23 - Systems-led vs sales-led growth

53:41 - What's next: more acquisitions and Green Storm Foods

55:53 - Where to find Paige

Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you have bought a business, and are open to sharing your story on the show, please email [email protected]

If you want to sell your business, I'm buying. Please email [email protected]

Connect with Dan Canham here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan1canham/

Dan Canham was made redundant three times in 20-odd years of corporate and consulting work. So in 2023 he backed himself and started Tomorrow Strategy Co. Then his first four clients finished their projects and moved on, and he had to rethink the whole model.

His answer was to own the services his clients kept asking for. In two years Dan has acquired BWS Recruitment (a 30-year-old Melbourne recruiter), AT+M Marketing (a 41-year-old Tasmanian agency) and WellsGray Recruitment. He went from a consultancy turning over about $250K to a group at around $6M in revenue, with roughly 25 people across Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania. He had no M&A background when he started.

Dan doesn't dress it up. He walks through how each deal was structured, from deferred payments and seller finance to leveraging his home equity, how he runs businesses in other cities through general managers, and where it's been genuinely hard. He's still looking for more established Australian service businesses to buy.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• The $250K consultancy that became a $6M-revenue group in two years
• No M&A background: the YouTube, books and trial by fire behind three deals
• Why he won a 41-year-old agency without being the highest bidder
• Leveraging home equity for a deal, and how the bank conversation went
• Seller finance: a third up front, the rest over three years
• Running Melbourne and Tasmanian businesses from Sydney, without being absent
• Why cross-selling across your own businesses is harder than it sounds
• The first 90 days after settlement: decision, decision, decision

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Three redundancies and starting Tomorrow Strategy Co

2:03 - Learning acquisitions with no M&A background

4:59 - Search criteria: 10-15+ year old service businesses

7:33 - Buying BWS Recruitment: deal structure and deferred payment

8:28 - Self-funding the first deal and setting up a holdco

9:41 - Hiring a general manager for a business in another city

12:50 - Running Melbourne from Sydney: is distance a problem?

13:56 - How the general managers are incentivised

14:47 - The first 90 days: decision overload

16:53 - The stabilisation year: don't change too much too fast

17:45 - Finding AT+M Marketing in Tasmania

20:56 - Marketing agency risk: retainers vs projects

23:02 - Structuring the deal: all up front, home equity

23:37 - How the bank conversation went

25:11 - Cross-selling across the group

27:12 - Buying WellsGray: seller finance over three years

29:22 - Managing three businesses at once

30:26 - What's next: more tuck-ins and an MSP

32:50 - The biggest challenges of the last two years

33:49 - Going from $250K to $6M in revenue

35:09 - How much growth is acquired vs organic

36:00 - Outside capital and ten more deals

37:57 - Where to find Dan

Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Shane Cheek spent more than two decades as a founder, advisor and investor in technology — roughly 15 years in venture capital and private equity across Australia and Southeast Asia — before deciding he no longer wanted to run other people's money. Instead of starting from scratch, he set out to buy a business that had already found product-market fit. In August 2021 he acquired Intouch Data, a Brisbane software company serving hotels, and by January 2023 he'd sold it to a PE-backed strategic for a figure between $20M and $30M. This episode is the full arc, told with real numbers.
Intouch began in 2002 extracting guest data for hotels, evolved into a software (ETL) provider, a guest CRM, and finally a business-intelligence tool that helps hotels optimise revenue the way an airline optimises seats. Shane walks through exactly how he bought it: ~$3.5M ARR, ~4.1x earnings, all-equity, with the family office putting in 100% of the capital while he put in the sweat (no salary) toward a 50% earn-in. He explains the dividend recap he ran months later with Long Reach Credit that handed most of that equity back, leaving only ~$1.5M at risk.
Then the value creation: rebuilding sales, billing and systems, de-risking a key-person technical founder, landing a global Accor rollout across ~2,500 hotels, winding down a legacy product, and — crucially — renegotiating the customer contracts that had blocked strategic buyers, which unlocked the exit. He bought on an EBITDA multiple and sold on a revenue multiple, and he's candid about why he won the deal without bidding highest (an all-cash-at-close offer). If you want a masterclass in structured, non-traditional acquisition, this is it.

IN THIS EPISODE:

CONNECT WITH SHANE CHEEK:

TIMESTAMPS:

Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you have bought a business, and are open to sharing your story on the show, please email [email protected]

If you want to sell your business, I'm buying. Please email [email protected]

Connect with Matthew Williams here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-williams-98474256/

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Matthew Williams spent 20 years as an Australian Army pilot before swapping command for contracts — an MBA, stints at Deloitte and Babcock, then a jump into entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA). In December 2023, Matthew and his search partner Patrick Prendiville closed on AFS, a 30-plus person fire and security services business in Melbourne, through Wattletree Capital Partners — a self-raised search fund with zero broker on the seller's side.

In this episode, Matthew breaks down what it actually looks like to search with a partner instead of solo: how they split roles, funded two salaries out of one deal, and had to aim bigger (above $2M EBITDA) to make the math work. He also gets specific on the unglamorous stuff — six months of proprietary cold outreach, an LOI-to-close due diligence slog, and the office move, software migration, and hiring binge that came after.

If you're weighing a self-funded search against raising a fund, wondering whether a partner is worth the split, or trying to figure out how "boring" businesses like fire services actually grow without a sales team — this one's for you.

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IN THIS EPISODE:

- Why two ex-corporate operators picked fire and security over anything flashier

- The real reason a partnership meant hunting for bigger deals, not smaller ones

- What six months of cold proprietary outreach through HubSpot actually looked like

- Why buying from a seller with no advisor made the deal slower and "clunky"

- The unsexy 12-month punch list after close: office move, new software, new GM

- How they grew revenue without touching the sales team

- Why they're now competing with private equity for their next deal

- The one piece of advice Matthew gives every first-time searcher before they raise a cent

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CONNECT WITH MATTHEW WILLIAMS: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-williams-98474256/ Wattletree Capital Partners: https://www.wattletreecapital.com.au

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Introduction

0:23 - From army pilot to MBA to ETA

2:53 - Meeting his search partner, Pat Prendiville

5:28 - Splitting responsibilities in the search

8:22 - Researching the industry before finding the deal

12:25 - Why buying with no seller-side advisor was clunky

17:54 - The business they bought: team structure and size

22:40 - The first 12 months: office move, new IT, new GM

26:29 - Growing revenue without growing the sales team

33:05 - The biggest advice for first-time searchers

37:38 - What comes after the first successful search

39:39 - How to connect with Matthew

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Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

0:00 - Meet Ashley: from medical device engineer to garage door owner
0:49 - The cold call that accidentally led her into ETA
1:38 - Ditching the traditional search fund raise
3:07 - Searching and raising in parallel
4:27 - The outreach system: 20-30 owners a week
6:14 - Building credibility with brokers as a self-funded searcher
7:11 - Landing on manufacturing and the criteria that mattered
8:03 - The "revenue flywheel" that sold her on Autolift
9:22 - Uprooting the family from Melbourne to Sydney
11:17 - Inside due diligence: building her own LBO model
13:26 - Who pays legal and accounting in a self-funded deal
15:40 - The headline numbers: $20M revenue, $4M EBITDA
18:04 - The "oh sh*t" moment and how the deal got funded
19:37 - The zero-and-thirty investor structure explained
21:37 - Day one chaos: the speech that never happened
24:01 - Where the real growth opportunity actually is
26:38 - The surprising truth about CapEx and ageing equipment
28:50 - Her three-person board and why it works
30:07 - The hardest part of the entire process
33:00 - Work-life balance after taking the wheel

If you have bought a business, and are open to sharing your story on the show, please email [email protected] If you want to sell your business, I'm buying. Please email [email protected]

This one's a solo episode from Dimitri. If you've sat through an ETA interview nodding along while someone throws around SDE, EBITDA, LOI, and Q of E like you already know what they mean, this is the fix. No guest, no fluff, just the vocabulary you need before you can actually follow a deal.

Dimitri works through it in four parts: how people structure their search (search funds, self-funded search, independent sponsors), how businesses get valued (SDE vs EBITDA, addbacks, multiples, enterprise value vs equity value), how the deal process runs (LOI, due diligence, Q of E), and how deals get funded outside the US, including why the SBA loan doesn't exist here and why that one gap changes everything about how AU/NZ deals get structured.

If you're tired of American acquisition content that assumes SBA financing and small deposits, this is the recalibration for how it actually works in Australia and New Zealand.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Why "SDE" and "EBITDA" aren't the same number, and why mixing them up costs you money
• The Stanford-born search fund structure, and why the searcher only keeps 25% of what they build
• Why self-funded search means no salary and no institutional backing, and how to get taken seriously anyway
• The one US structure that doesn't exist in Australia, and why that's the whole reason this show exists
• How a roll-up turns a string of 500K businesses into millions in arbitrage value
• What actually happens in due diligence, and why the Quality of Earnings report matters more than your word
• Asset sale vs share sale: the difference that decides which liabilities you inherit

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Why acquisition jargon confuses new buyers
1:08 - What "ETA" actually means
1:54 - Search funds: the Stanford model and searcher equity
3:53 - Self-funded search vs the independent sponsor route
5:36 - How businesses actually get valued
7:17 - SDE vs EBITDA: the real difference
8:56 - Addbacks and the multiple, explained
11:08 - Enterprise value vs equity value
12:10 - Asset sale vs share sale
14:14 - Working capital adjustments and the deal process
16:23 - Due diligence and the Quality of Earnings report
17:38 - Funding the deal: why the SBA loan doesn't apply here
18:51 - Vendor finance and seller notes
19:32 - Equity, debt service coverage, and the roll-up strategy
21:56 - Key glossary takeaways

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Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Japan Mehta took an unconventional route into business ownership. Born in India to two teachers and set on entrepreneurship since he was a teenager, he trained as an engineer — a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering and a Master's in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering in the US — and spent two decades across semiconductors, aerospace, medical devices, construction, oil & gas and now digital infrastructure. He met Pete Seligman a decade ago when Pete hired him to turn around a founder-led business — a job that made him a restructure COO and lit the fire to run something himself. In 2020, mid-COVID, he found a struggling business that needed help, raised the capital, and by mid-2021 was sitting in the CEO seat of what is now Ticketless Parking. Only afterwards did he realise he'd effectively run a self-funded search the whole time. Today it's had the biggest revenue year in its history, and Japan is back in the "searcher seat" hunting bolt-ons — while mentoring and investing in the next wave of searchers.

This episode is a genuinely useful clinic on the part that scares most first-time buyers: the money. Japan breaks down how the searcher typically ends up with 20–25% equity (and how vesting works), why he argues a funded search beats going it alone even if you can self-fund, and — using a hypothetical $30M deal — how surprisingly little cash actually has to change hands once you stack equity, debt, vendor notes and earnouts. He's candid about diversifying your equity partners so you don't hand control (and your upside) to one big investor.

IN THIS EPISODE:

TIMESTAMPS:

Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you have bought a business, and are open to sharing your story on the show, please email [email protected]

If you want to sell your business, I'm buying. Please email [email protected]

Connect with Jason Hew here: https://nz.linkedin.com/in/jasonhew1

Jason Hew spent a decade learning how good businesses and good deals work — as a PwC chartered accountant and M&A advisor, then in-house at Woolworths Group, then helping scale (and exit) Cashrewards. Instead of chasing a tech startup, he went a different route to entrepreneurship: a traditional search fund, backed by investors and SMEVentures, to train himself as a first-time CEO. In August 2024 he closed the deal — acquiring two instrument-transformer manufacturers in one transaction, WF Energy Controls in Sydney and TWS Energy Controls in Christchurch, then moved his young family across the Tasman to run them.

This is a genuinely numbers-rich episode. Jason walks through the whole thing: a full year of searching, ~4–5,000 businesses contacted, five offers made (and four lost to private equity and strategics), a software deal that died on Christmas Eve — and finding the winner on Seek Business on the 2nd of January. He's open about the ~$10M revenue, just-under-$3M EBITDA business he bought at roughly 3.5x, and exactly how he structured it with zero of his own money down: investor equity, big-four bank debt, a vendor note and a one-year earnout.

IN THIS EPISODE:

CONNECT WITH JASON HEW:

LinkedIn: https://nz.linkedin.com/in/jasonhew1

TIMESTAMPS:

Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you have bought a business, and are open to sharing your story on the show, please email [email protected]

If you want to sell your business, I'm buying. Please email [email protected]

Connect with Blake Noble here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nobleblake/

Most acquisition stories stop at the purchase. Blake Noble's runs the full distance — buy, grow, and a clean exit eleven years later. After 15 years in his family's medical device business (he started as a warehouse junior and left as a director), Blake chased a long-held obsession with trucks and, in 2015, bought TransCon: a sleepy 45-year-old transport business north of Auckland with around 16 trucks, ~$2.4M revenue and ~$400K EBITDA. He sold it in January 2026 having roughly doubled the revenue — with fewer trucks than he started with.

This is one of the most complete operator stories we've had on the show. Blake is refreshingly honest about the parts most people hide: the New Zealand transport valuation formula he bought (and sold) on, why he cut ties with the vendor after two weeks, the funding mistake that left him at the bank's mercy, and the mid-ownership divorce that forced the sale of the home securing his debt — and nearly sank his capex plans. He explains how a finance broker helped him escape a "flat no" from the bank and restructure into a non-bank asset funder that unlocked the cash flow to finally grow.

You'll also get the growth playbook in detail: literally following competitors' trucks to find customers, the $3,000 client who'd never once been contacted in nine years, owner-to-owner selling, Pipedrive, and the counterintuitive "shrink to grow" divestment that lifted the whole business.

IN THIS EPISODE:

TIMESTAMPS:

If you have bought a business, and are open to sharing your story on the show, please email [email protected]

If you want to sell your business, I'm buying. Please email [email protected]

Connect with Jackson Allan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonallan1/

Most people assume you need to be rich, or technical, or both, to buy a business. Jackson Allan is neither. After 15+ years in B2B commercial leadership across Australia and the US, he founded the search fund Touchstone Point in 2024 and — 30 days before this conversation — closed on Passmark Software, a 27-year-old company built by a computer scientist that operates at the deep technical interface of hardware and software, with customers like Apple, Boeing and Milwaukee Tools. There's a nice symmetry to it: the deal traces right back to his own roots rebuilding computers as a kid. He did it through the search fund model — raising capital from investors first, then hunting for the right business to step into as CEO, without signing a personal guarantee or putting his own assets on the line.

In this episode Jackson pulls back the curtain on the entire search fund model — where it came from, why a first-time buyer would choose it over going it alone, and exactly how the economics work for the searcher (the salary haircut during the hunt, the equity upside after). He's refreshingly concrete about the grind: 2,500 cold outreaches narrowed to 400 replies, 100 conversations, 20 serious looks, and one deal. He breaks down staging due diligence on a cross-border, multi-jurisdictional deal to limit broken-deal costs, the very real "deal fatigue" that sets in after six months, and what the chaotic first 30 days of ownership actually involve.

If you're an operator drawn to acquisition but stuck on "I don't have the capital" or "I'm not technical enough," this is the operator-to-operator playbook for a path most people in Australia and NZ have never heard of. (Note: the deal is under NDA, so Jackson keeps specific figures off the table — the value here is the model and the process.)

TIMESTAMPS:

Deals Down Under is the podcast about buying, selling, and growing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.