My company, ShotFlow, is a decade old. It was a problem I fell in love with in the market. It has to do with solving very complex production challenges for large studios that shoot very high volumes of photography, primarily for retailers and brands that are feeding their e-commerce and other channels with more and more content to help sell products, and sell large sets of products where they need things like a front and a back and a side image of these different products.
So, we built a custom workflow tool for that, highly configurable for different clients, and had built quite a nice business with some of the biggest brands in the world before we entered our M&A process.
We reached a point where we had an angel investor who was fully in on the business, but was carrying a lot of risk in the business, and wanted to get out, or at least reduce risk. We were in a position where we were not really funded the way we wanted to be. We were looking at a variety of options: Do we fund the company externally? Do we look at M&A? What were our choices? And, as a classic, it is a story as old as time. My job was to run the business and figure out how to make the business work, but I am not at all a financial person. I am not someone who focuses on that side of the house.
Really, myself, my CFO, who is our angel investor, and our board member, that is an independent board member that sort of advises us, we were all a bit out of our depth, and we kind of needed help to figure out how do we move forward, what happens to the company, how do we achieve these goals we want while we are navigating sort of unknown waters.
We were referred to Oaklyn Consulting by a law firm that we were working with, who said, “I think you need help with this transaction beyond the legal part. We can redline agreements, but you need help with the business side of it to represent your interests.”
We reached out, spoke to Frank and the team, and were kind of blown away by the amount of insight Frank brought to the early conversations, in terms of the perspective he took. The way Oaklyn Consulting worked with us was exactly what we needed.
Frank’s approach and maturity, being clearly extremely deep in knowledge but able to speak to us in this very simple and easy way, was not intimidating. It was all about being collaborative and understanding what we were trying to do. There was clear alignment in the sense that “I am here to figure out how to help you solve your problem, and I know this space well.”
Frank helped us secure interim financing while we were working on the M&A process, so there was a referral right out of the gate. This person and this team can really work with us deeply.
It made a lot more sense the way Oaklyn Consulting wanted to work as a consultant, where we were paying for the time we needed, but there was no piece of the deal or things like that that we felt were not appropriate for the way we wanted to proceed. We wanted to buy expertise, essentially in partnership, and the way that worked was compatible with how we were structured in terms of what we could spend as a very small company with very limited resources.
There was a strategic component: advice on bringing other parties to the table, maximizing deal value, and helping us understand how to weigh different options at different points. Then there was the tactical part: how do we organize a due diligence process, for example, which we had not been through before?
They helped us structure and set up due diligence so it could be done properly and quickly. They helped us ensure that they screened many of our data room items before we shared them with the partner we were in an LOI with and doing due diligence with, so we did not make easy mistakes.
They were able to catch things and help us make sure that everything was understood. So, they were, on a tactical level, the intermediaries to ensure we were not communicating in ways the buyer would not understand.
So, just all of that, on both levels, was incredibly valuable.
I think Oaklyn Consulting is different in how they work compared to the other M&A partners we looked at. You just want to have options and choices. You want to consider an organization that does this every day and is really focused, in my case, on smaller entities from a relative perspective, relatively smaller transactions, which have a very different set of parameters than these big M&A deals.
So, there is a sort of boutique specialization there that, if you are in that place where you have never been through this before, you have never done it before, frankly, you are out of your depth and you are lost, you need someone who is going to pilot this through with you, kind of the copilot, mentor, and advisor.
I absolutely feel very strongly that that is the role that Oaklyn Consulting played for me, and I would always recommend them, at least as an option to consider.
I have learned so much. My partner learned such a tremendous amount about how this works. I also feel like we ended up building these great relationships where, if I ever were to go through this again or ever work with anyone that is going through it, my first point to them is going to be: if you do not have a valued advisor in this transaction that can step away, represent you, and create some distance to be that intermediary, because I have to work with the company that acquired us day to day.
What was really important about what Oaklyn Consulting was saying is, “Let us do the heavy lifting on the transactional side.” In a sense, we can be the ones to bear bad news or negotiate in a very challenging way, but you can also be the person trying to help make it happen.
It set us up for success so that I was not in the middle of a negotiation, having to, again, play a kind of hardball with a company that could do that.
We ended up having something where that help was critical to it happening at all, and I think it was critical to having the right outcome.
Actually, when we closed the transaction, it wasn’t just about having a great business experience. I reached out to Frank and said, “Please, let me take you to lunch sometime because I just want to talk to you more. I feel I have now this sort of person who has such an amazing perspective.” Lane and all the other folks on the team. It is like you made this contact that has real value for you in business, and I just want to kind of absorb more of that.
So, we also built a great relationship.