Content+Cloud

Headquartered: London, United Kingdom

Investment date: 2016

Exit date: 2021

Cloud & Digital

https://contentandcloud.com/

At a Glance

800

Team

Acquisitions*

4.0x

Return on exit

*During ECI’s investment

How we helped

Content+Cloud is one of the UK’s leading technology services, solutions and support providers. It helps clients transform the way they do business, optimise the way their people work, and provides them with flexible and secure platforms on which to operate.

Content+Cloud is Microsoft’s leading partner in the UK, headquartered in London, and operating from Manchester, Milton Keynes, Reading, Cardiff and Cape Town in South Africa.

Strategic acquisitions:

Our origination team worked closely with the management team to build a market map of 600+ potential acquisitions targets, lead on the outreach effort, and supported the management team on executing on opportunities and delivering integration.
ECI provided additional funding to support Content+Cloud’s ambitious M&A strategy, delivering six acquisitions during our investment.

Sales & marketing:

Following a number of acquisitions, a rebrand was initiated to align the Group under one brand, transitioning from IT Lab to Content+Cloud.

Tech & data:

Content+Cloud has successfully integrated historical acquisitions and in FY 2021 has begun the implementation of a group wide ERP system.

People & culture:

We supported the CEO with a number of senior hires including a non-exec Chair, a CFO, an MD and a Chief People Officer since investment.

In 2021, ECI announced the sale of Content+Cloud to Advania, the Nordic region’s most experienced provider of IT infrastructure and Integration services generating a 4.1x return. ECI have reinvested in the combined Group as a minority investor.

Over the last five years we have grown organically and acquired key businesses within the Microsoft ecosystem, creating a scalable platform from which we can continue to build. ECI has been immensely supportive in backing the management team’s vision, and hugely valuable in helping us to acquire market leading capabilities and combine the components of the group into a fully unified offering to clients.

Peter Sweetbaum

CEO, Content+Cloud

How did Content+Cloud deliver such impressive growth?

We backed IT Lab, the predecessor of the Content+Cloud, as a 5 to 6,000,000 EBITDA business with just over 30 million of revenue. 6 acquisitions later, it was north of 100 million of revenues and over 20 million of EBITDA.

Technology services and digital transformation – it’s a really exciting place because it’s constantly evolving and dynamic. Content+Cloud is a business which helps clients leverage the capabilities and propositions of cloud technologies.

We chose ECI after a full process. Obviously, it really, really understood our industry. And frankly, they got an amazing reputation for being very supportive but obviously driving success.

Peter had always been very clear that he wants to build something scalable and he wants to build something of enduring value, not just kind of smashed together a lot of businesses and flock it on to someone else.

I think that’s always been our mantra, building successful businesses. So once you have that alignment, you get that great collaborative conversation.
The Content+Cloud rebrand was absolutely critical for us and that was key to coalesce all the investment and all the capabilities that we brought together as a company, I think into one.

It was great and I think we were really lucky just in terms of Peter had planned this big employee kick off of Battle of the Bands. So we had a band for each of our offices and we gave them budget to go in studios and to record and to really practice, you know. Then we had a night where they played two of the bands played live.

This is about people making feel that that their employer values them, that Peter the management team are investing in them and doing something fun.

We worked really well with the ECI origination team to to map the M&A market. The ECI origination team mapped over 600 different businesses that were potential acquisitions for content and cloud and, and from that the the business completed 6 deals. The impact the acquisitions on our growth were transformational and what we’re able to acquire was really, really unique capability at the right price with the right organisations that made a difference to the overall growth trajectory and the outcome.

If you think about the the capability and the opportunities that the business was bidding for by the time we came to exit, it was phenomenal from where IT Lab was in 2016 and the sort of opportunity they might hope to to land to the sorts of bids that Peter was was putting in.

I mean it’s phenomenal in terms of just night and day different business. We’re now part of the Advantia group. It’s a really, really perfect fit for the company and ECI have been great to work with. In fact, if it wasn’t for the kind of reality of a need for an exit, I would have loved them to stay on. You were consistent all the way through.

So for somebody looking for a private equity partner, that’s what you want at the end of the day. So yes, I would wholeheartedly recommend this, Yeah.

DIVE DEEPER

Listen to our podcast with Peter

In ECI’s podcast, “Building Successful Businesses,” we speak to CEOs about the building blocks of success and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. In Episode 7 we chat to Peter Sweetbaum, CEO of Content+Cloud, about the role of digital transformation in a post-pandemic world, the importance of creating a compelling culture as part of your M&A strategy and his top advice for CEOs looking for investment.