Bill Sasser created The Management Trust in late 2005 as part of an industry rollup, merging six companies to form an employee share ownership plan, or ESOP. The community association management company is owned by its 700 employees, but it is Sasser’s job as chairman and CEO to provide value and profitability for the company’s employee-owners. As part of that, he has helped to spearhead a growth-by-acquisition strategy that has helped the company broach new markets and new lines of business.
Smart Business spoke with Sasser about the acquisition strategy at The Management Trust – which is the DBA name of The Management Association Inc. — and how to effectively implement an acquisition strategy at your company.
At the outset, what was the process like to roll all of the companies together to start The Management Trust?
We really invoke the ESOP culture quite a lot in just about everything we do, and probably our biggest cultural difference between an ESOP company and a nonemployee owned company is the degree to which we engage our employee owners. That really kind of changes the dynamic considerably. What we’ve done is we operate with a high degree of transparency for all of our employee owners, because they are our shareholders.
In doing so, they understand the good, bad and ugly of what our strategic vision is, what our financial performance is, all of those sorts of things. So as we are going through the post-merger integration issues, which is compounded by the recession, we would share with them the challenges we’re having. What we have found, and this is the beauty of an employee ownership culture, is even when you are sharing with them news that is not entirely positive, they feel honored and respected for being given the information at all.
Moving forward, what has been your growth strategy?
Historically, we have relied heavily on the homebuilders to fuel our growth. Obviously, over the last five years, there has not been a lot of home development. So we really found ourselves in the position of needing to reinvent the company. What we have done is a couple of things: No. 1, we realized we needed to find recurring nonvolatile revenue streams that are predictable, as opposed to the volatility of the real estate market. We went about doing that, creating some proprietary programs and so forth, and in so doing, we built a model that became scalable. So once we realized that we had built a strong business model that could prosper even in a difficult economic time, and had recurring predictable revenue streams, that is what then gave rise to the acquisition strategy.
What makes for a good growth opportunity in your situation?
I think it is a couple of things. First of all, every company’s long-term strategy is going to be somewhat different. My job description is very simple: the creation and preservation of ESOP share value for our employees. That is really what I do. Parenthetic to that is a lot of different things. But as it relates to the acquisition opportunities, we look for three different things. We look for companies that are either strategic markets, meaning markets that we know we need to be in to grow this company into a national presence. We look for companies that have what we call a strategic skill set, which may be a particular area of expertise that we can leverage throughout all the positions of the management trust. Again, with the idea that we want to create a business model that is scalable. Thirdly is simply tuck-unders, where we just acquire a focused business and fold them into an existing office of the national trust. The most important criteria that we look at when we are exploring a potential acquisition opportunity is where we can create value.
What would you tell other business heads about developing an acquisition strategy?
I think if I had to identify a couple of key points for somebody considering acquisitions, the first point would be to find a point of differentiation between your company and other acquirers in that business space. If the company is simply trying to compete on price while not considering other factors, a bidding war is going to ensue, and that is not going to work. Sellers want to find a company that is going to be a good fit. So any way you can differentiate yourself from your competitors is better. I think that culture is critically important in any acquisition strategy. You need to find a company that is going to fit.
How to reach: The Management Trust, (714) 285-2626 or www.managementtrust.com
