2006 – Management Buy-out

In 2005 Cadimage was on the hunt for a new person to lead out Business Development. Throughout our history to date we’d always focused on salespeople who were more technically minded as it was important, they would be capable of demoing ArchiCAD to prospective customers.

By 2005 as the business was growing well and we’d invested our ARCHICADselect income into growing our technical team we decided the time was right to employ a top salesperson who could be supported by our technical team.

We also wanted to get someone who would commit to the team in the longer term – we’d gone through around 5 salespeople since I began – therefore when advertising we indicated there would be equity options for the right candidate.

As a result, we employed Tracey Gatland – who to this day remains involved with ArchiCAD and still hasn’t installed it on her laptop!

Around a year after employer her, Tracey started asking about the equity options. I had recently increased my shareholding and Murray and I put together plan for Tracey to purchase three share parcels over a period which would see her end up with a 25% shareholding.

Around the same time based on a series of events, Murray offered me the entire business at a particular price. Murray was basically fulltime with Buildmedia by that stage. The price Murray indicated he’d sell to me was (not too surprisingly) higher than the options we had offered Tracey.

I was very keen to take Murray up on the offer and took advice about how to finance it. The easiest way to finance it was to allow Tracey to buy 25% up front. I therefore gave Tracey two options, either she takes up the original options at the original price (spread over 2 years) or she cold jump in boots and all at 25% but based on the higher price Murray had offered me for the whole business.

Tracey jumped in and on 16th October 2006 (Cadimage 17th birthday) Tracey and I bought Murray and Tracey joined me as a director.

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