The company I founded got acquired. Now what?

Originally published on LinkedIn, November 2023, shortly after the Shopsys–SGA merger.

The company I founded got acquired. Now what?

Sounds Good Agency | Shopify Experts (SGA) just merged in October 2023 with Shopsys . Now that the acquisition is official I would like to invite you to the backstage and walk you through the process, what it means to me and the overall market in the future.

Before I get started, let me give you a quick intro to the companies in question. SGA was founded by me and has focused exclusively on Shopify since 2016. At the moment of the merge, we were 15 people in-house at the time, and we're serving mainly Shopify Plus merchants with both strategy, frontend and backend development. Shopsys was in an all different level than us. They are the number one Ecommerce solutions provider in Czechia and Slovakia, and are basically 10x bigger than us revenue and popularity wise.

Why would they be interested in getting into business with such a small fish like us? Glad you asked...

WTF?

Robin Navrátil (CEO and co-owner of SGA) and I first met Petr Svoboda (founder of Shopsys) and Matej Kaposvary (CEO of Shopsys) during one of the top Ecommerce events in Czechia on the 17th of May 2023 - Reshoper . At the beginning I never thought we'd become besties , but I was curious to get to know them and learn from their vast experience.

For my immense pleasure and surprise, soon we discover that Shopsys was considering to jump into the Shopify market and were already internally building a division to work on those projects. Not because they stopped believing on their own technology, but as a way of expanding the market they could serve. The Shopsys Platform, which is ideal for custom builds, can require a bigger investment than only bigger companies are able to afford.

Nice surprise - we found some cool partners. We may work together on interesting projects. Let's follow up with some coffee, soon, shall we? Photo from Shopsys' 20 year anniversary event

That escalated quickly 🤯

On our next coffee meeting, we realise a couple of interesting things:

We like each other - they may be much bigger than us, but we can have an healthy conversation and share ideas as if we're on the same level

They are really serious about getting into Shopify - but have very little idea on how to manage it in an efficient fashion.

They may be open to buy us?!

Would we be open to it? After chatting with Robin about it, we realised that... hell yeah!

The small agency life is tough as f*ck!

Especially as you start growing and having bigger clients, your cashflow is always at risk, every week there's a new challenge related with your growth, and any bad decision can put you under. Shopsys was already where we wanted to be - and with their support and partnership, we were even more sure we would make it! And way faster than by ourselves.

Let the games begin...

Once we were aligned on the idea of potentially getting in bed together, we all knew that due diligence was important. More than any legal and accounting review (which was of course fundamental), we needed to know if we could actually work together in the long term. In order to get to the bottom of it, we've invited Petr and Matej to join our internal quarterly meeting. It was a great experience:

We were completely open as if they'd be part of our company already, therefore they saw exactly what was the situation of our company

They didn't judge us for our weaknesses, but saw our potential in our strengths

Our values seemed to be basically the same - saying that we are culturally aligned is an understatement

These guys from Shopsys were humble and approachable - never treating us as if they're the big guys with all the answers, but as partners that want to help and learn from us too

This meeting was the foundation of our relationship, based on which we could start working together immediately, as if all the papers were already signed. Trust and cooperation became the guidelines for all future interactions.

Were you afraid?

Kind off, but not really. Robin, João Antunes and I, as owners of SGA, had some fears, but thankfully all of them were broken apart step by step. For example, there was the question of loosing control over leadership decisions, or deteriorating some of the cultural aspects we've built into our team. Will we have to radically pivot our efforts and stop serving our international customers? Will we have to force people to go to the office after 7 years of being remote-first?

All of these fears were natural, but unfounded. We were able to clarify all of those concerns with Shopsys to make sure we entered in this new partnership full of confidence in the future.

What now?

After the merge, the previous owners of SGA like myself traded their ownership of the company to became shareholders in the Shopsys group. This is quite incredible, because from one day to another, I stopped caring only for my 15 people team, and now I care deeply about the results and success of our group of almost 80 people. What else changed?

We have veterans in the business to help us grow - not just as a company but also personally

We have access to new tools and resources (from marketing to HR, legal and finances) which before would be unaffordable at our scale

We can take on more and bigger projects without so much cashflow-related fears, because we have a strong partner that can support us in the tougher moments

We have the seal of approval of Shopsys in our market, confirming that our efforts over the years made sense: Shopify is indeed a valid technology to serve not only the international clients, but also our local markets.

To give you an idea of how much this merge is catapulting us to the next level, in the past, we would send one huge proposal (bigger than 200K€) for a project once a year. Now we're sending 1-3 offers like that on a monthly basis. The demand for our premium services keeps on soaring, and we're collecting the fruits of years of building up our know-how. David Simões and Matej Kaposvary in Retail in Detail organised by Blue Events .

Looking forward to what's next

What do I expect from these news, now that we're fully and officially together? We plan to grow a lot! We're working hard towards unifying our operations and optimising our processes. This will help us a lot to get better deals and work on them more efficiently. This steps are fundamental to support my personal mission of educating our market on the advantages businesses can get by leveraging Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Are you interested in learning more about our merger and the future of Shopify? Sign up for my newsletter to get the latest updates. We have a lot of ideas and projects coming up, so don't miss out and stay on the loop:

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What do you think this merge means for our market? Are you expecting just as I an exponential growth in Shopify's usage in Czechia and Slovakia? What is your opinion on Shopify's growth in Central Europe? Let me know what you think in the comments 😉.