Essco is a family-run calibration laboratory outside of Boston, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1961, and my father purchased it in 1974. I’ve been working here full time for over 35 years. We built up a really strong customer base, mostly local to start, and today we work with pretty much everyone you’d know among the Fortune 500, industrial companies mostly. We grew steadily over that time and became very successful at what we do, one of the top privately held independent calibration labs in the United States. So we were a good takeover target, I’d say.
I’d received quite a bit of interest over the past ten years to sell to different groups, but I chose to keep growing the company and ignore all of that. As I got older, I started to think more about the security of the company going forward, and it became apparent that I would have to make a transition.
I was really looking for more of a consulting approach from an investment banking firm, someone with a more flexible way of working with their clients. I was talking to a wealth management person about it, and he had heard about Oaklyn Consulting. When I started to get more into the deal, I decided to call Frank. We had some good conversations, and I added him to the team.
He got along well with my legal team, and he was also able to work with some of our in-house people as we went through the conversations with the company we eventually sold to. It was nice to have another person involved in those discussions who had the investment and transaction experience that we sort of lacked at Essco at the time. It was good to get an outside opinion on what was appropriate and what wasn’t, because most of the people at Essco haven’t been through a lot of these types of transactions. It helped us navigate some of the post-transaction things that can matter after the deal is done. Frank got up to speed really quickly, which was great.
I would highly recommend them, especially if you’re on the fence about whether you want to get involved in a more formal process versus getting consulting: learning more about the pitfalls of selling your business, what you need to look at, and paying as you go with Oaklyn Consulting. I thought that was really good, as opposed to locking in and having less flexibility if things aren’t going the way you wanted. That was the real value of Oaklyn Consulting, being able to add them to the deal midstream. If you’re in that situation, I think Oaklyn Consulting is a great fit.