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“Ownership by the Publicis group will open up a whole series of new opportunities for us on the brand side, with complementary technology sets that they’ve bought and purchased in the past. It gives us that more rounded approach of both onsite and offsite. And it gives us the muscle that we perhaps didn’t have as a startup, with access to resources we’ve never had before.”
The decision to sell the business was a quick one.
“We were very mindful of what acquisition can do to a business, espe- cially when it’s a giant business buying a small business. Sometimes they don’t work out as well as originally planned.
“Publicis came up as the best partner by far for many reasons. First and foremost, they are allowing us to protect and retain our culture.
“We really enjoyed our conversations with Publicis, and in particular, their CEO, he’s very entrepreneurial and that made the decision easy.”
The geographic spread of the business works, with half of CitrusAd’s business in the US and Publicis with 58% of its earnings in the June quar- ter. Organic growth was running at more than 15.1% in the three months.
“It’s an extremely natural fit in the US market and abroad, where we do provide a lot more media services and sales. We’ll control the tech- nology, but also the full funnel sales as well.
“Publicis is one of the biggest agency, if not the biggest, in terms of FMCG. They have a highly concentrated client base in retail, both on the retailer side and also on the brand side. That was another strength to the partnership.
“We sit as a standalone business unit, to maintain the CitrusAd brand and legacy. That was really important for me, especially because of how important our clients are to us and the deep personal relationships we’ve developed. And also our staff.”
Moran describes the sale as both an emotional milestone as well as major financial moment.
“We buried a lot of demons throughout this process,” he says. “As a startup founder, you have doubt in the back of your mind at every turn, no matter how successful you appear to be on the outside, the fear of failure burns deep.
“It’s a proud moment, but it’s honestly more a sense of relief, to finally get to that finish line and redeem what was at least to me, a failure first time round. Although a finish line in one respect, it’s just the start of a new chapter in a dif- ferent capacity.
“Nick and I are still hungry. We want to keep going. And we felt that other acquirers might not have provided us that privilege, may have absorbed us and swept us into a much bigger organisa- tion or change the structure of our business.”
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