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It is always interesting to meet with members of the investment community and hear their perspective on what an effective acquisition strategy entails.   Very seldom do outsiders understand the significance of the subjective side of an acquisition in the services industry.  Our assets are, without a doubt, comprised of groups of highly intelligent people across the globe who most of the time have a number of options as to what they want to do for a living and for whom they want to work.  So, the big question is “what is the expected value of an acquisition”.  You certainly hope that the answer is that it is perpetual and will become an invaluable part of building an even better company that, as our CEO likes to say, “is built to last”.  That is what we have tried to achieve at Sierra Atlantic.  We believe that our most recent acquisition of Baytree Associates out of Charolette, N.C. will be one we look back on as a strategic step in building a great company.

Sierra Atlantic considers a number of potential acquisition opportunities each year, many of which are in areas that are complementary our strengths and capabilities.  Evaluating technical skills is actually one of the easier steps in the process.  The real work comes when you dig into the culture of the company, its people and its customer satisfaction.  That is what we looked for with Baytree.  We discovered a group of highly motivated, competent consultants who had year-after-year demonstrated the ability to grow their business, achieve consistent profitability, and win customers long-term loyalty with the high quality and reliability of their work.  That was the key as far as we were concerned.  If you achieve these three attributes, you will be successful in this business.

It has been just over a month and things are going quite well.  There have been no surprises and while we are successfully integrating the two companies, we both agreed that anything we did subsequent to the merger needed to be secondary to continuing to offer the best possible service to our respective customers.  I am confident that this is being accomplished and that everything else will fall into place.  We are seeing a strong recovery in IT services and while there are still a number of challenges brought about by the economic landscape over the  past two years, we are very optimistic about our future growth opportunities and are happy to be exploring these possibilities with our newest partners at Baytree Associates.