I had the chance to sit down with Devon Walker and Matt Cromwell of GiveWP to talk about their sale to Liquid Web.

GiveWP has been the dominant WordPress donation plugin over the last few years. This move makes sense for Liquid Web as they continue to round out a complete managed WordPress solution for their customers.

Liquid Web acquisitions have been on a steady increase lately, with their most recent large acquisition of the Events Calendar plugin.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode with Devon and Matt.

Transcript

Liquidweb acquires GiveWP

[00:00:00] Matt Medeiros: [00:00:00] We were just chatting before we hit record. Devon, you were mentioning that things were getting wrapped up started to get almost wrapped up last week.

[00:00:06] I’m sure this has been a process. When did this start? What does the timeline look like for some kind of acquisition this size? 

[00:00:15]Devin Walker: [00:00:15] We’ve known Chris Lema for a while now. I’ve known him probably 10 years almost.  Around November of last year, I received an email from him that said, Hey, would you be interested in talking about how potentially we could work together, more liquid web? And what does this look like? And throughout the rest of 2020, we kind of went back and forth , “Hey, what does this look like?”

[00:00:36] What it, what does it potentially mean for you? What does it mean for us? And then come the new year we landed on. Okay. Potential acquisition could be in the cards. And then a lot more negotiation around that into the LOI phase. And eventually we settled on something that made sense for the both of us  our company and liquid web, but our entire team.

[00:00:59] And [00:01:00] then once we went through that, we got into more of the due diligence process, which was a very interesting and. A good learning process for everybody involved and then eventually closed on April 30th of last month. 

[00:01:12]Matt Medeiros: [00:01:12] Same brand new parent company, more resources to the customers.

[00:01:17] As people listen to this today, not much is going to change. Matt, Devin turns to you and says, “Hey, we’re thinking about getting acquired by liquid web from a CEO’s perspective, where do you start going to dot the I’s cross?

[00:01:27] The T’s? What was that whole process like as somebody who kind of sees every oversees, everything?”

[00:01:32]Matt Cromwell: [00:01:32] Don’t mess with my tools. I got stuff going here. The biggest thing Devin and I always have been on the lookout for is more resources. The ability to, to inject more energy into the stuff that we’re doing.

[00:01:43]One of the most important resources we have all the time as our team. So that was definitely my very first thing is do they want the whole team? And the immediate question answer to