Australia's First Traditional Search Fund

Alex Simmons is the founder of Voyager Equity, Australia's first traditional Search Fund launched in early 2019. Before launching that fund, Alex was a manager with Partners in Performance in Sydney and prior to that, an investment manager in the UK. He's had some interesting experience across management, consulting, and also private equity. 

In this episode, I get Alex's perspective on the search phase as he prepares to complete an acquisition later this year. We discuss in this conversation how he's used a steady approach to ensuring that he doesn't just buy any business, he wants to buy a good business with which to build value.

Alex gives us the highs, the lows, some of the challenges, and also talks through some of the attributes that others might need to think about if they're considering Search for themselves. I hope you enjoy it.

Show Notes:

• 01:44 – Alex talks about how quickly you can connect with people in a range of other markets. How culture affects different kinds of markets, and how a lot of things might work in this country but don't work in other countries.
• 04:24 – Alex talks about how he got involved in the search and what really took him to the point to decide that it is the right path to take for himself and what are the important things you need to ask yourself before taking the searchers path.
• 11:34 – Coming to the end of his search phase, Alex talks about his experience and some key take-outs, good and bad, that might help reflect what he's been through in that search journey and what he would tell people considering that in mind.
• 16:57 – Alex talks about his expectation coming to the search on the marketplace in terms of vendor and vendor response and his current perspective of the vendors in the Australian market and the market itself. 
• 26:09 – Alex talks about his priorities what he would be focusing on in his six to twelve months of acquisition.

• Connect with Pete: LinkedIn
• Connect with Alex: LinkedIn