“It ticked all the boxes,” says FD after £14m acquisition

AUGEAN’S growth strategy is coming to fruition as the Wetherby-based business targets non-organic growth to complement stellar performances over the past few years. Richard Laker, financial director at Wetherby-based Augean spoke to TheBusinessDesk.com following the £14.0m deal for Colt Industrial Services, announced yesterday.

He said: “We acquired Colt because the business ticks all our boxes: enabling us to move further up the chain to tier one clients, getting greater visibility for our industrial division and expanding our services in that sector.

“It’s basically bang on our strategy. Colt have an extremely good reputation in terms of customer relationships, and come with framework agreements in place.

“Its a synergistic acquisition. The area of industrial services generates a lot of waste and we can redirect that in the rest of the Augean group – growth is better inside the group than out after all!”

Mr Laker also said that the leanness of Augean and Colt’s operations means that back office functions can be absorbed, without redundancies, ith 75 permanent staff and a further 55 short term contractors moving over.

“A lot of the value in the Colt business is in its core people. There are still detailed discussions going on but eventually the long term objective is to rebrand.

“In the medium term, the Colt business is recognisable in its market and has brand value attached to it.

“The immediate short term focus is to integrate Colt and drive forward the synergies that we identified when we decided to buy it.”

Augean’s inorganic growth does not stop with Colt however. Mr Laker said; “There are acquisition opportunities across all five divisions, see opp across them all as long as the acquisition can add strategic value to the group.”