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.

• 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 Elisha here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elishanuttall/
  

After ten years writing reports at PwC and Grant Thornton telling other people how to fix their businesses — and watching them do nothing with the advice — Elisha Nuttall decided to take his own. In 2022 he and a long-time friend bought their first company, a hand-built aerial manufacturer that was being run on paper. Three deals later, Talanton Holdings owns a group doing around $4M in revenue and over $2M EBITDA, and Elisha is involved in the first two businesses for about half an hour a week.

Elisha breaks down every deal with real numbers: the multiples he paid, how he stacked vendor finance against bank debt, why he deliberately offered $100K over asking to win 0% vendor finance, and how he funded two more deals on internal equity and a bit of family money while keeping control tight.

If you've ever wondered whether you can actually buy a business and step back to do it again (instead of buying yourself a 80-hour-a-week job), this is the operator-to-operator conversation that shows how the management-team-first model really works.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Why turning up sweaty and bleeding to the first seller meeting actually won the deal
• The exact capital stack: 30% equity, vendor finance and bank debt split across the other 70%
• Why he paid $100K over asking — and got 0% interest for 2.5 years in return
• The brutal trade-off: not paying himself for two years to pay down debt faster
• Turning a paper-run, no-systems manufacturer into a quality leader in 12 months
• The three-tier reporting structure that lets him run multiple businesses remotely
• How he de-risked a family business (husband, wife and daughter all in senior roles)
• Surviving COVID, container-rate spikes and supply-chain chaos through every deal

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - The first deal: a paper-run aerial manufacturer

0:15 - Showing up sweaty and bleeding (and why it worked)

2:32 - The numbers: revenue, EBITDA and a 3.5x multiple

4:00 - Building the capital stack: equity, vendor finance, bank debt

5:12 - "I didn't pay myself for the first couple of years"

5:53 - Why he offered $100K over asking price

8:00 - Who is Elisha? From PwC and Grant Thornton to acquisitions

12:31 - The childcare deal that fell apart at the last step

13:04 - Day one of ownership: a hundred little decisions

16:24 - The big levers: foundations, quality and QA test sheets

22:59 - How a non-engineer ran a manufacturing turnaround

25:15 - Building a management team through promotions

28:40 - Can you really step away? Half an hour a week

30:25 - Keeping customers happy without the owner in the room

40:15 - Funding deal two with vendor finance and family equity

41:10 - Deal two: a 60-year-old powder-coating business

41:19 - Deal three: Signals NZ and the family-business red flag

44:20 - Writing the daughter into the contract

48:04 - The silent partner: his CFO with a day job

49:41 - "Any oh-shit moments?" COVID, shipping and war

50:33 - The lifestyle: $4M of businesses, ~30-hour weeks

54:31 - Headline numbers and what he bought vs. what it's worth now

Matt Stevenson started his career in Big Four M&A before moving into banking — watching businesses fail not because they were bad, but because their owners couldn't manage them. That became his thesis for buying his own. He's now Managing Director of Bizstats, a monopoly SME sales data provider, and NZ BizBuySell, New Zealand's leading business-for-sale platform — both acquired off-market from sellers who weren't looking to sell.

The two deals couldn't be more different. Bizstats came from a deceased founder's children who had no idea what the business did; Matt fired the operator after one week. NZ BizBuySell was chalk and cheese — a founder who stayed on, taught him everything, and genuinely wanted him to succeed.

In this episode Matt gets honest about twelve months of persistence on two separate proprietary deals, how he funded them, why vendor trust beats any financial metric, and why most people in ETA over-analyse everything and never actually buy anything.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• The year-long search for Bizstats — and why the sellers' ignorance of their own business was the biggest risk
• How he transformed a Microsoft Access-era business into an automated platform and grew revenue 50%
• Why he fired the operator after one week — and ran the business alone at 4:30am before his day job
• Why vendor trust is his #1 green flag — above anything in the financials
• How COVID house prices unlocked his first acquisition — and why funding is the real bottleneck for most buyers in their 30s
• Why he took vendor finance on the second deal even though he didn't need it
• Advice to his younger self: partner up, buy bigger, move faster

CONNECT WITH MATT:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-stevenson-53208493

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Matt's path from Big Four M&A to business ownership

2:55 - Discovering Bizstats: data gold behind a 70-year-old's inbox

4:24 - Settlement date vs. C-section date

4:57 - What Bizstats is and why it was worth buying

7:17 - Multiple and deal structure for Bizstats

8:18 - Proprietary search: wearing a seller down over 12 months

10:06 - Funding the deal: COVID house equity, cash, and bank debt

11:51 - Transforming Bizstats: from Microsoft Access to automated SaaS

14:18 - How AI changed the economics of small business tech

15:38 - Discovering ETA after already doing ETA

18:00 - Finding NZ BizBuySell the same way he found Bizstats

19:31 - Comparing the two deals: size, staff, sophistication

20:28 - Deal structure for NZ BizBuySell

22:16 - Going full time: the first Christmas break he didn't dread

23:20 - Crap moments: misrepresentations and firing the operator

25:37 - Owner trust: the #1 green flag in any acquisition

26:23 - Vendor finance as post-settlement protection

27:13 - How the NZ BizBuySell deal was funded

29:02 - Monopoly positions and why they made both deals easier to back

30:08 - On over-analysers in ETA who never buy anything

31:44 - Synergies between Bizstats and NZ BizBuySell

33:07 - What comes next

34:53 - Advice to younger self: partner up, buy bigger, move faster

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

Pete Seligman has been buying, running, and backing businesses since 2013. He started the way most acquisition entrepreneurs do - a mate, some savings, and a bank loan secured against their houses. Today, as the founder of EtA Forum and EtA Central, he's Australia's most active Search Fund investor, directly involved in 15-20 deals and having backed more than 20 searchers across the Asia-Pacific.

In this episode Pete gets honest about what it actually takes to build a portfolio of small businesses. There's no ten-step framework and no passive income shortcut - just hard-won lessons on delegation, deal structure, earn-out negotiation, and the mental discipline required to show up for ten different businesses without losing your mind.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• How Pete manages board positions across 10+ companies (and the Bill Clinton trick he uses to stay focused)
• Why you should never assume you can just "install a CEO and walk away"
• Why delegation - not deal-finding - is the real reason most small businesses never break through the $20-30M revenue ceiling
• How Search Fund deals are structured: equity splits, vesting, and IRR hurdles explained plainly
• Funding options for solo acquirers in Australia without a Search Fund
• How Australian sellers really feel about earnouts, including a seller who turned down a free $1M
• Whether keeping the seller involved post-close actually works

CONNECT WITH PETE:

Website: www.peteseligman.com.au

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteseligman

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PeteSeligman

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@peteseligman

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Managing multiple businesses: plate spinning vs juggling

2:52 - The Bill Clinton brain compartmentalisation trick

6:46 - The myth of "buy a business, drop in a CEO, walk away"

10:16 - Delegation: the #1 ceiling for small business owners

13:55 - Running two businesses at once

15:52 - Pete's shift from operator to Search Fund investor

18:34 - How Search Fund deals are structured

21:46 - Funding an acquisition without a Search Fund in Australia

24:26 - Earnouts and vendor finance in Australia

27:58 - Should the seller stay on after the deal closes?

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