M & A Rainmaker

I was just Googling around when I came apon this link:

http://www.fasttrack.co.uk/fasttrack/leagues/dbDetails.asp?siteID=1&compID=675&yr=1998

If I remember correctly Voyager was in the Fast Track 100 about 3 years running.

Having acquired Spider Networks in 1996 we were growing at a phenomenal rate with 1998, 1999 and 2000’s turnover getting up to around £13 Million.

By 1998 we were heading for an exit in around 1999. Of course this turned out to be one of the best decisions of our lives because of the dot com crash in March 2000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

Whilst Voyager was growing in the period of the dot.com Boom it never was a dot.com company. Actually it was what was referred to at that time as a ” Bricks and Mortar ” company. That is to say that we had real revenue and real profits and we provided the infrastructure for what we called ” Large and Medium Sized Businesses ” ( LAMBs ). Voyager Networks was a Corporate Value Added Reseller ( V.A.R. ) and Voyager Internet was a Corporate Internet Service Provider ( C.I.S.P. ).

In the above Wikipedia description of the Dot Com Boom it is interesting to note the difference between what Cisco did and what Nortel did. ( Voyager was almost solely a Cisco reseller and a Gold Cisco Partner ) Not only did this ensure the survival of Cisco after the dot com crash but also it’s survival and prosperity through the recent recession

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession

At the outset of the recession I believe that Cisco had about $28 Billion in cash reserves.

The mentality in the 90’s for most dotcom’s was expanding their customer base as rapidly as possible, even if it produced large annual losses. It was:

Think big, Start big ( Spend loads ), Move fast.

The mantra for today, post the dotcom crash and the recent recession is:

Think big, Start small ( Spend as little as you can ), Move fast.

John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco has another mantra aswell:

Visualise, Strategise, Execute.

This was actually how we did things at Voyager in the 90’s – We thought very big ( as Nigel used to like to say ” Punching above our weight ” ), we strategised about how we could achieve our goals, we executed our strategy in a low cost way and we moved very fast.

That, for example is how we built The Voyager National Network and became a Managed Network Services Provider long before it was fashionable to do so.

Nostalgia is actually pretty well what it used to be – to me anyway.