Huel are the 7th fastest growing private company in the UK

I can see why, Thor.

4 Likes

Not posting much at the moment, but this is one worth commenting on I felt.

Lots of firms use these lists, I imagine that the chaps at the top get plenty of calls as a result!

To address the idea of a listing though, that’s one of several options available but from purely a Corporate Finance perspective it’s best to not nail your colours to a single mast.

By way of example, when Rothschild acted as the CF advisors during the secondary sale of Wiggle, they achieved an incredible price from a Private Equity firm by using a method called a “Triple track process”.

What this means, in the very simplest of terms, is that rather than set up a single process (e.g. an IPO) they put in place three simultaneous processes - so, preparing for an IPO, preparing for a PE sale and preparing for a trade sale.

It took a long time as accounting methods and requirements vary between the different methods but ultimately it created an excellent level of “auction tension” which led to an amazing price return for the shareholders.

The business had been acquired for around £12.5m in 2007 and sold for £180m (plus potential earnouts of over £20m) in december 2011.

I remember the date so well because it coincided with a retail dinner I was running at the time but because it was my team at my old law firm that was acting for the sellers and management, every single partner that was booked in for the dinner had to be replaced! (This wasn’t a minor dinner, it was an event of over 180 people that I partnered with Deloitte and Barclays for lol).

Anyway, best to never assume an IPO, although given the current currency situation I’m sure there’d be few problems to bump up the Sterling price per share!

You are very clued up :+1: :man_teacher:

11 years working for one of the largest law firms in the world and then working at a US private equity firm will do that for you. :ok_hand:t2: