A comprehensive value creation partnership drove a 3x increase in digital revenue and enterprise value, resulting in a competitive private equity sale six months ahead of schedule
"We asked Collingwood to help us to streamline the business and build a new plan. Working with them helped us to quickly adapt our product set and reshape our teams. They see every challenge as an opportunity and have got a deep understanding of where we've been, where we're at, and where we need to get to. The Collingwood team became part of my business."
Challenge
Data Centre Dynamics (DCD), then a publishing and events company in the digital infrastructure space, sought to transform their business, which was heavily reliant on launching new small events and display advertising revenue to drive growth.
Despite having a sizable international team and operating in multiple geographies and timezones, the business remained heavily founder reliant. This was both unsustainable and also held back growth. They wanted to become a marketing services company with a diversified digital portfolio and predictable recurring revenues.
The business needed to transform its fortunes and scale towards an exit.
Solution
Collingwood began working with DCD in 2018, delivering a restructuring plan that enabled the business to be completely focused on its core markets and products. The plan resulted in investment by Resolve, and Collingwood continued to work with founder George Rockett to create a stand-out value proposition and an integrated, data-driven, and content-led business model providing unique insight to buyers and measurable ROI for vendors.
Crucially, Collingwood worked with the founder to define his ideal role within the business and where he could add the most value. We also helped to define the structure needed to enable this and a process to ensure the transition happened in a risk-managed way.
With Collingwood’s support, George brought in Dan Loosemore as COO to drive operational efficiency, build the marketing services engine, and develop high-performing sales and marketing teams. This directly drove up Market Leadership Potential and high Quality of Earnings. Collingwood also created the leadership progression plan and supported George and Dan through a measured succession process, enabling George to focus on product and brand development, with Dan taking on the CEO role. Additionally, we helped them put a high-growth sales strategy in place, which continues to drive exponential growth and bear fruit today, post acquisition by Opus Origin.
Our team conducted customer insights studies, as well, which helped inform an integrated marketing services and 1:1 events value proposition that has driven growth, quality of earnings, and created unique data.
Collingwood’s Corporate Finance team then advised Resolve and George on their exit and investment options. Underpinned by Collingwood’s market insight, we developed DCD’s three-year growth plan and ran a successful process that led to the sale of DCD to Opus Origin in 2022.
Results
Partnering with DCD, we helped to transform the business into a market-leading marketing revenue platform and scaled events platform. Growth of marketing services and the creation of a compelling, meetings-driven event model saw revenues of meetings-driven events increase by 300%, key client retention reach 100%, and Annual Account Spend (AAS) from bellwethers exceed 120%. The business also achieved a significant uplift in enterprise value and strong EBITDA margin.
Through a competitive, multi-party process, Collingwood secured private equity investment for DCD six months ahead of the capital event schedule, resulting in the management team partnering with Opus Origin.
ROI
- 3x increase in digital marketing services revenue.
- 3x increase in enterprise value over three years.
- Created framework to drive exceptional AOV and revenue retention growth.
- Achieved benchmark EBITDA margins, driven by revenue growth and improvement in productivity.