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RKCA’s IT MSP Industry Insights (10.7.2024)

Welcome back to RKCA’s IT MSP newsletter. This time we are going to look at what we consider “Best in Breed” for a number of the metrics many IT MSP owners collect on their business. We have also included a snapshot of the transactions that took place through Q3’24 for

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The Bistro Group Gets a Valuation That Exceeds Expectations

THE GOAL Orchestrate a complex multi-state, multilocation deal in a down market that satisfies the differing priorities of more than a dozen shareholders. THE OUTCOME “RKCA got a price beyond our expectations and got us through the process to closing.” Al Stahl CFO, The Bistro Group In 1989, lifelong business

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Hydrotech Sources their Ideal Buyer With Aligned Goals

THE GOAL Source the right buyer to consolidate Hydrotech with another manufacturing business, thus securing the long-term stability of the company for employees. THE OUTCOME Hydrotech was acquired by a company with a positive work culture and the capacity to offer improved solutions as well as quickly address changes in

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Eric Hornung joins RKCA

CINCINNATI, Jan. 6, 2020 – RKCA announced that Eric Hornung has joined RKCA as an Associate. Eric joins RKCA from Duff & Phelps, a New York City-based financial services firm focused on valuation, corporate finance, and other situational advisory, where he served as Vice President. At Duff, Eric had a

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RKCA Announces New Addition

CINCINNATI, OH– RKCA announced that David Graham has joined RKCA as Senior Investment Banking Analyst. David joins RKCA from Mariemont Capital, a Cincinnati-based fixed-income hedge fund where he served as Vice President. There, he focused on marketing the fund to institutional investors, performing valuation analysis, and monitoring performance of existing

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RKCA Adds To Team

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, a privately-held, independent investment bank focused exclusively on serving the middle-market, is pleased to announce the expansion of its offerings and an addition to its executive team. Carter Gaither (LinkedIn) joins RKCA as the Managing Director of the firm’s newly created pre-transaction advisory practice, the Build-to-Sale

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ASAP Garage Door – Deal Announcement

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the successful sale of A.S.A.P. Garage Door Repair, Inc. (“ASAP” or the “Company”), a leading service provider and distributor of garage doors, garage door parts, and operators in Illinois and Wisconsin. The transaction closed

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Leprechaun – Deal Announcement

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the successful refinancing of Fischer-Bush Equipment Rentals, Inc. (“Fischer-Bush”, “FBE”, or “Company”) with WesBanco, Inc. (“WesBanco”), a multi-state bank holding company headquartered in Wheeling, West Virginia. The transaction closed in July 2024. Fischer-Bush, headquartered

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JWP – Deal Announcement

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCACINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the successful sale of Johnson Welded Products, Inc. (“JWP” or the “Company”), a leading manufacturer of air reservoirs – also known as air tanks – used primarily in heavy vehicle braking

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RKCA Team Expansion

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce that we have expanded our team of investment banking professionals to include three new analysts, including Eric Langen, Kingsley Ediae-Holly, and Colton Markland. We are also excited to announce that we have promoted Justin Hollon to

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Ntiva’s Acquisition of The Purple Guys

Ntiva, backed by PSP Partners acquired The Purple Guys from Kian Capital and ParkSouth Ventures, forming a goliath in the IT managed service provider market. The goal from Ntiva was to create “one of the largest, pure-play MSPs,”1 and this acquisition has pushed towards this goal by not only expanding Ntiva’s

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What Business Owners Need to Know

“Hello, my name is Sam and I’m a member of the team at Cold Outreach Capital. We’re really excited about partnering with business owners like yourself in your industry! We’re currently looking to acquire businesses like yours for as much as [insert outrageous amount] times EBITDA.1 Would you like to

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RKCA’s IT MSP Industry Insights (5.8.2024)

Welcome back to RKCA’s IT MSP newsletter. In this installment we will look into the various types of buyers you may encounter during the process of going to market and selling an IT MSP business. These typically can be broken down into three categories: Financial, Financial Backed-Strategic, and Strategic. We

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Ascent Technologies

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the successful sale of Ascent Technologies Inc., (“Ascent”), an AI-driven software platform for regulatory compliance. Ascent was founded in Chicago, IL in 2015. Ascent’s founding team witnessed firsthand the government’s response to the Great

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“Is This A Good Offer For My Business?”

Before we get to that question, please allow me to introduce myself as I’m new to writing this email newsletter. I’m Brent White, an Associate at RKCA. I live here in Cincinnati with my wife and three children, ages five (Shepherd), three (Haven – “Daddy please call me your daughter,

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Synthica – Deal Announcement

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the Infrastructure Business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s (“Goldman Sachs”) successful equity investment in Synthica Energy, (“Synthica”), an energy transition platform aimed to design, build, own, and operate large-scale, contracted anaerobic digestion facilities to

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Simple VMS – Deal Announcement

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the successful sale of SimpleVMS, (“Simple”), a leading vendor management system for mid-to-large employers. Avionté, a Bloomington, MN-based leader in enterprise staffing and recruiting software, acquired SimpleVMS, a Cincinnati , OH-based vendor management system

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Batched Labeltraxx Siteline – Deal Announcement

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the successful sale of Label Traxx (Tailored Solutions, Inc.), Batched (Batched, LLC), and Siteline (My Siteline, LLC), (together “the

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Aladdin

CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce CINCINNATI, OH – RKCA, Inc. (“RKCA”), a leading, independent, middle-market investment bank, is pleased to announce the successful sale of Aladdin Steel, (“Aladdin”), a leading specialty steel distributor of carbon steel tubing and pipe.

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The Milestone Effect

At a client meeting last week, we highlighted the sell side process at RKCA and its many steps.  And, as expected, some variation of “wow that’s a lot of milestones!” was exclaimed.  This…almost always happens.   There are two answers to our approach in laying out a detailed Gantt chart

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The Three Types of Investment Bankers

Having young kids is a constant (and very humbling) reminder of how complicated the world is and how little we (“I”) understand it.  Not only are the questions difficult, but the “whys” afterward can break you.  Take a recent weekend example where I was asked to explain how an airplane

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Let’s Play The Blame Game

Raise your hand if you’ve been playing “The Blame Game” since March 2020?  We are now three years since the start of the pandemic.  Three years ago this week we were setting up home offices at RKCA “for a few weeks” and organizing virtual team happy hours to keep the

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Burn the Ships

I consider myself a tolerant person. My wife and I have added three kids to the world in the last six years while both working. I can manage a Teams call while feeding a baby and while switching to mute to tell a toddler “okay wait right there and I’ll

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What is Investment Banking?

(This article is part one of the three part series: Introduction to Investment Banking in Cincinnati) No industry loves jargon like the finance industry. “Michaelson, run through the YoY (Year-over-Year) quarterlies to compare trailing EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) against industry comps and to update our multiples

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Don’t win the day at the cost of the decade

Midway through the month of December, it hit me like a freight train: high fever, no appetite, stuck in bed with zero energy. Ahh, I assumed, the flu (despite having an annual shot) finally got me. I was proud of myself for having made it that far into 2022 with

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The Most Important Success Factor – Survival

“What are you reading ?”  my wife, Jane, asked me a few weeks ago.  I replied “A book about life in Vietnam Prison Camps.”   Jane has the not-so-fun privilege of falling asleep every night while listening to pages turning and a book light shining into her eyes well past when

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You can’t sit around waiting for the answers

You can’t sit around waiting for the answers I had the privilege in 2014 to travel to Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway Annual meeting. A friend had tickets and I was able to check an item off my bucket list. With the confluence of kids, work, COVID restrictions, and lack

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It’s Axiomatic…boogie woogie woogie

If you’re humming the Electric Slide right now (fun fact the song is called “Electric Boogie” by Marcia Griffiths), then I’ve done my job. Good luck getting it out of your head today. The word axiomatic (one of my favorites) means “self-evident or unquestionable.” As I write this article, the

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The Weather Channel and Your Business

I’m writing this month’s RKCA Insights from our basement on Labor Day Weekend. My daughters are engrossed in “Cinderella” on Disney; and the plans we had for time outside and at the pool have been thwarted by a rainy weekend.  And if this were not the tenth time they’ve watched

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Do The Painful Thing First

I’ve never actually kicked a can down the road, and I don’t think I’ve seen someone do it. Perhaps it’s a result of being a Millennial, maybe the generation before me would just kick cans around. I don’t know. I grew up on AIM chats and burning CDs and trying

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Asymmetrical Focus

If adding a third child to your family teaches you anything, it’s that how you focus your time matters.  I’m writing this from the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), our 3-week-old spiked a fever  and we were sent to the ER and now NICU for

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Nobody cares, not even your mama

It’s my opinion that in this current climate of 2022, it is easy to feel sorry for yourself. Here are some examples of conversations I’ve had over the last 72 hours with business owners: We had a prospective client scored as 70% confidence in our pipeline, but they went with

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The Power of Mindset in a Deal

Over the last three years at RKCA I’ve had the opportunity to observe many sell side transactions. I use the term “observe” for two reasons: My primary day-to-day role is focused on our Direct Investment Portfolio My route to RKCA and by extension the world of investment banking is rather

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The Power of the 20 Mile March 

In advance of our third child arriving in June (be on the lookout for a guest RKCA Insights writer that month), my wife and I are “glamping” in southeastern Ohio.  As I write this from the porch of our cabin with a fire going, I’m both wondering why I brought

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PE transactions, more popular than Squid Games in 2021

As of this writing, we mark the two-year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic. When studying the impact on the Private Equity markets, its our opinion that the pandemic did little to slow down the industry’s momentum in 2021. As a result of the various monetary actions taken by the Fed

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What Joe Burrow Teaches us about Intangibles

Let me be the last (hopefully) person to wish you a Happy New Year, it is February after all.  2022 has started off with stock market declines, ice storms, Omicron rates surging, and some welcomed retirements in the NFL.  Most exciting, for those of us who call Cincinnati home, the

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Newsletter (1.12.2022)

According to Dealogic, 2021 was a record year for M&A transactions, with global M&A surpassing $5T in volume for the first time. The overall value of global M&A amounted to $5.8T, comfortably topping the previous record of global M&A, which was $4.6T in 2007. 62,193 deals occurred in 2021, which

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A December to Remember Sales Event 

No…this is not a promotional email to buy a new Lexus with a giant bow on top right in time for the holidays. But as we sit here in mid-December, I cannot help but reflect on the last twelve months and what we all thought this December would look like.

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Newsletter (11.11.2021)

Valuation multiples for companies remain at an all-time high fueled in large part by investors being flush with cash and a high level of confidence in the current business environment. According to Pitch Book, Global M&A activity continued its record-setting pace, with just over 27,000 deals completed for a combined

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RKCA Promotes Neil Ursic to Partner 

RKCA, a privately-held, independent investment bank announces the promotion of Neil Ursic to Partner. Neil joined RKCA in 2019 as its Vice President of Direct Investments, after serving as CEO of Batterii, a SaaS-enabled market research firm based in Cincinnati. During his time at RKCA, Neil has worked primarily inside

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Loss Aversion Regulators

The concept of Loss Aversion has been well studied. It came out of the 1979 work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and is encapsulated in the expression “losses loom larger than gains.”1   Essentially, people feel pain from losses much more intensely than they feel pleasure from gains of the

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Why Buzzword Bingo isn’t so bad (sometimes)

After a decade in management consulting in my 20s, I received certain perks: being paid to borrow clients’ watches to tell them what time it is, hotel status galore, airline miles for days, and the right to poke fun at the buzzwords that consulting firms throw around. But before you

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Compounding effects and why you should hire a moving company

Have you ever witnessed a feat of human strength so incredible it’s etched in your brain? Maybe you saw something in the most recent Olympics, or watched “Grandma rips phonebook in half” on YouTube, and thought “how does someone do that?” I’ve recently witnessed something even more impressed: movers.   My family and

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