Ep 515 Inside the Mind of an Acquirer with Valtech's Randy Woods

**Colin Morgan** (0:07)
Hi there, and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company. I'm the executive producer Colin Morgan. Now, M&A is back with Vengeance. After a quiet couple of years, strategic buyers are active once again, especially those sitting on cash and under pressure to show growth in 2026 That means many business owners will start getting calls from this quarter from acquirers looking to begin conversations.
These deals won't close before year end, but will set the stage for what's shaping to be a busy year ahead. That's why we're re-releasing the conversation with Randy Woods, who built non-literary creations into a 120-person digital agency before selling to Valtech, a global leader in digital transformation and consulting. Now, after the sale, Randy joined Valtech as the SVP of strategic growth opportunities, where his job until recently was to acquire other companies. It's a rare two-sided look at M&A from the founder's seat and the buyers. Without further ado, here is John Morlo and Randy Woods. Enjoy.

**John Warrillow** (1:19)
Randy Woods, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.

**Randy Woods** (1:21)
Good morning.

**John Warrillow** (1:22)
It's great to have you here. And I would characterize this as a two-for-one deal, because you both sold a company, I want to ask you about that, and obviously, you now buy companies. So today's episode is part of our Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series. So we're going to spend a lion's share of our time talking about Valtech and what you look for when you're wearing your kind of acquirer's hat. Before we go there, I'd love to just ask you briefly about the business that you created and sold, Non-Linear Creations. This was a marketing agency of some sort?

**Randy Woods** (1:57)
Marketing, we evolved over the years. So back in 1995, a university buddy and I decided to start an internet company, because that sounded like something promising, and we knew nothing about anything, but nobody else did either. So it wasn't a bad time to start a company. We grew that for 23 years. And yeah, we evolved from a company that was primarily focused on marketing, so that by 2017, we were a fairly heavy lifting technology company. We had developers in Brazil and Canada. Our markets were in Canada, sorry, in the US and the UK. So our not so secret business strategy was to pay our people in Canadian dollars and Brazilian reais and then charge people in UK pounds and US dollars. It worked out pretty well. And then yes, we sold the company six years ago yesterday, not that I'm counting.

**John Warrillow** (2:39)
Happy anniversary, I think.

**Randy Woods** (2:40)
Thank you.

**John Warrillow** (2:42)
So how big did you get this company? How many employees were you guys?

**Randy Woods** (2:45)
About 120 employees.

**John Warrillow** (2:47)
Okay.

**Randy Woods** (2:47)
And I think the interesting thing for the acquirer was that we were in multiple countries and already solved a bunch of the intercontinental and intercultural issues that come with that. And so we were attractive to a certain class of acquirers that had that global scope to the company.

**John Warrillow** (3:05)
Okay. So I'm a bit confused about what the company did. So is it marketing and technology? So just describe typical engagement.

**Randy Woods** (3:11)
Yeah. By 2017, we were a specialist in Sitecore Content Management System, Sitecore CMS. A fairly large vendor. We've been involved with them for seven years and we were working on some of the largest deals in the world with them. So we had technologists that were specialists. We had, I think, seven Sitecore MVPs out of a group of 32 in the world. So we were the best in the world at that software platform. And then we had a bunch of ancillary services as well.

**John Warrillow** (3:35)
So you were reselling that software?

**Randy Woods** (3:37)
No, we were implementing it. So we did no reselling. So we had people who would show up as much as the vendors will tell you it's out of the box. It's not. Most engagements lasted more than a year to make this thing work. And so we just helped transform the promise of the software into the reality for the clients.

**John Warrillow** (3:52)
OK. Actually, you're the second person I've talked to in the last little while. We just did an interview with Miles Faulkner a couple of weeks ago who did something similar with Atlassian software. So they integrated the software into mostly banks and telephone companies and stuff like that. So bringing the software to life. But they were effectively a services business, which sounds like you were.