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Telos Capital: Eliminating complications in a complicated carve-out
Sagiss, LLC : Published: September 26, 2024 Updated: October 1, 2024
The Challenge: The team at Telos Capital Investors is small, just three people. But together those three principles have more than 100 years of experience being deep inside of businesses. They know how they work. They know that things can get messy. And they know that things can often move slowly. Right until they have to move very, very fast.
That was the case with one of their clients. Glasshouse was a family-owned custom glass provider that had been purchased by a larger, public company in the building services space. While there was nothing wrong with the larger organization, culturally things had changed. Royce King had decided he wanted to buy his family’s business back. He turned to Telos to help facilitate that process.
In addition to helping raise capital for the carve out, Telos managing partner Bob Lutz oversaw all the technical aspects of the transaction, and that’s where Sagiss comes in.
The Solution: These kinds of transactions are naturally complicated. They can be a lot of hurry-up-and-wait while all the legal and financial details are worked out. But once they are and it’s time to finalize the deal, things can move lightning quick.
It’s a bit like flipping a switch. Once the carve out is complete and a new company exists, that company needs to be almost immediately operational. That means that while all of the details are being worked out by the lawyers and accountants, everything a new business needs to be operational must be set up. That means a whole back office needs to be built out and a transition plan needs to be put in place.
Lutz and Telos gave that responsibility to Sagiss. The Sagiss team spent time ahead of the transaction’s close building the new cloud infrastructure Glasshouse would need, pre-configuring all of the new PCs and equipment the team would require, implementing a firewall structure, and developing a plan for switching out all of the managed switches used by the previous owner.
Then, when the day of the close happened Sagiss managed the migration of the users and the business to the new environment in just one day.
The Result: In Lutz’s experience, hiccups in a deal like this are common, even expected. Not this time.
Sagiss prioritizes being solution oriented and eliminating unnecessary complexity, and that’s true no matter what form the complexity takes.
During the process of transferring the system’s in Glasshouse’s Austin warehouse, Sagiss discovered a mistake that had been made. Instead of bringing the problem to Telos’ attention, they were proactive in fixing the issue, emblematic of a solution-focused approach that Lutz saw throughout the engagement with Sagiss.