[Top Agency Series] Growing a Business Through Strategic Acquisitions With Thomas Le Maguer of Republix

Thomas Le Maguer is the Co-founder and CEO of Republix, a growth marketing agency that helps marketers attain a fearless attitude and enhance their ability to drive and accelerate growth. Republix seamlessly handles business growth needs through numerous disciplines supported by well-educated people and robust technology platforms. 

Thomas has over 15 years of experience in the financial industry, working in various sales and management positions. Additionally, he has co-founded other companies and serves in executive roles at Consolidated Capital Corporation, eRational Marketing, Integrity Distributed Software Solutions, and Vequitas Capital Corporation. Previously, he was the Vice President of Sales and Inside Sales Manager at ONE Financial, where they successfully increased sales by 127%.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:27] Thomas Le Maguer talks about Republix and what it does
• [04:56] The genesis of eRational Marketing agency 
• [09:53] How Republix grew through acquisition 
• [14:15] Republix’s acquisition criteria
• [19:39] The valuation process in an acquisition
• [29:32] Lessons learned from acquisition failures
• [33:19] Thomas shares the importance of having mentors
• [41:42] Republix’s customer success stories

In this episode…

Starting and running a business is one of the most challenging things you can do, but growing it is even more difficult. While there are many ways to expand your business, acquisition remains one of the most effective. By acquiring another company, you can gain access to new customers, products, technologies, and expertise. However, it’s crucial to approach acquisitions with caution and careful planning, as it can be a risky and costly process.

Serial entrepreneur Thomas Le Maguer acknowledges that acquisition is a strategic move that can help your business achieve rapid growth and gain a competitive edge in the market. It allows you to expand your reach, diversify your offerings, and tap into new revenue streams. By acquiring a company that complements your strengths and weaknesses, you can create a robust, more well-rounded business better equipped to meet your customer’s needs. He shares their journey of acquiring multiple brands and the lessons learned.

On this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Thomas Le Maguer, Co-founder and CEO of Republix, to discuss how they grew through acquisitions. Thomas talks about Republix, how it structured its acquisition deals, its acquisition criteria, and the lessons learned from acquisition failures.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Thomas Le Maguer on LinkedIn
• Republix

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Uri Levine on LinkedIn
• Daniel Peña
• Opher Brayer on LinkedIn
• The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
• $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex Hormozi
• Winners Dream: A Journey from Corner Store to Corner Office by Bill McDermott.
• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Tips To Thrive in the SaaS Space With Sujan Patel” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “If you want to change the world, you have to lead people — you can’t do this alone, you need a team.”
• “A difficulty is nothing more than an opportunity.”
• “95% of businesses don’t sell.”
• “Nobody knows the business more than the CEO.”

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com. I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Thomas Le Maguer and he is the CEO and co-founder of Republix. And Thomas before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast and we have a mutual friend, Jason Swenk. He’s been on the podcast twice. And the first time he talks about how he built up his agency to over eight figures and sold it. And the next one he talked about was really about Republix, and what you guys are doing because I know he’s involved, and you guys collaborate on Republix. So everyone, check those episodes out. And another one good. One is, you’ll appreciate this one time was Todd Taskey I had on he’s got the Second Bite Podcast. So what he does, he pairs private equity with agencies and help sell agencies. And he finds sometimes they get more on the second bite than they do on the first, right because they sell the private equity and that private equity sells for a larger multiple because they built up more EBITA. And that’s actually what Thomas is doing and has done, which we’ll go through that and many more on inspiredinsider.com. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution around the podcast Thomas we call ourselves the magic elves that work in the background and make it look easy for the host in the company. So they just run their company develop great relationships and produce great content. So for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email [email protected]. And I’m excited to introduce Thomas Le Maguer. He’s CEO and co-founder of Republix. They help clients in direct to consumer brands, dental clinics, a b2b professional services, SaaS. And what they do is they help these companies generate revenue, predictably, who doesn’t want to do that? Right? They were the 14th fastest growing company Canada with nine agencies in their group, and over 32 million in revenues. Most impressive thing. Thomas is. I’m not sure how you all do all this. You have six children, five boys and a girl. That’s crazy. Right? You look young, too. So thanks for joining me.

Thomas Le Maguer 3:08

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:11

Let’s just talk about Republix and what you do first, but I want to get into where this all started with the eRational, but talk about Republix for a second and what you do, because I know you were saying before we hit record, you have 25 services.

Thomas Le Maguer 3:27

Yes. And so RepubliX was built on a vision where the major problem is that growing a business is hard. And I know this as an entrepreneur, Jeremy, you know this, your listeners would know this as well. And one of the primary reasons for failure is a lack of growth. Now, so revenue solve a lot of these issues. And so we came into the market saying we want to go ahead and solve the revenue problem. And one of the big things that we focus on is how to deliver predictable growth, which is revenue and leads on a hassle free basis. Because the other big issue is once you know what you need to do, which is a problem in itself, then you have to manage multiple agencies, vendors and internal teams, some work, some don’t. And then you as the founder or the CEO, or the executive are now mired in the details and not doing your job. So we said we want to go ahead and handle that pain for our market. And we want to go ahead and make that growth experience easy, predictable and hassle free. And so that’s been the mission for Republix.

Jeremy Weisz 4:47

Your journey started with your agency before you grew talk about the initial idea for the first agency.

Thomas Le Maguer 4:56

So it happened by mistake, you know, I did A career in finance, and then went off on my own with a trading company. We’re doing futures and options. It went really great right off the bat, and then nothing after I quit my job for one year period. So we’re on the edge of bankruptcy, and decided to go ahead and add value to my investor list. So built up a list. Turns out, I knew how to do some advertising didn’t know that that’s what it was called back then, but had a list of maybe 10 15,000. Investors, and just started asking them, what do you want to know, I’m here to help. And they started providing this different information, in terms of what they wanted to learn, because I learned through, you know, over 5000, phone calls with these folks, that they wanted to generate money, so that they could fund their projects or things of this sort. So based on that I created educational content, myself and other partners who were experts within their field. And at the end of the day, I said, hey, by the way, if you love this, you’ll love this course, that was structured all around what they wanted to know, that we would build with these partners, and teach them on a six week intensive. And then we did $17,864 that day, saved us from bankruptcy, which was amazing, and never went under thanks be to God came close many times. But from there, people said, could you do that for us, that’s how we eRational marketing was born. So it was born by mistake, it started with clients. And at which point there, my specialty was how to take somebody’s knowledge, turn it into a curriculum, and sell it using a product launch methodology to go zero to a million dollars in sales as quickly as divinely possible. And the record for that was two weeks in 2015. But I was a one man army at that point. And my mentor at the time said, listen, if you want to change the world, you have to lead people, you can’t do this alone, you need a team. So started building a team in 2015. And then with eRational marketing, started seeing that people were having a really hard time in terms of growing their company. And then we became obsessed with how to deliver the result predictably. And because most of them would sign up for services, or take a course or whatever it is, and 99% of the time, they would fail. And so we ended up breaking that success rate up in terms of getting a funnel up getting some traffic going, doing all that stuff, with 67% of people getting results within five days, which is crazy. But that came this new methodology of how to make sure that we’re delivering on the service like a process, and making sure that process is repeatable to produce the appropriate outputs, which is revenue lead sales. And so that was eRational Marketing. And what we realize there is they would then say we were specializing in b2b professional services. And then they’re like, can you build us a website? We’d say yes, and then lose money? And then can can you go ahead and do Facebook ads? We say no, but we have a partner that does, and then the partner would fail, or there’d be an issue in terms of handing off the client, and the customer relationship would fail. So if you can’t build it, and you can partner for it, we said, let’s buy it. And then that became the start of the Republix journey to find the services that our customers were asking for. And bringing those into the group so that they could have that seamless experience. And then further productize those services for scale.

Jeremy Weisz 9:14

So you ever route eRational, and it sounds like the first iteration was info, products and teaching. And then people were asking you to do it for them. And then you started doing for them. And that turned into an agency model. And then the next piece is you were getting requests for the services you weren’t doing. And you would say yes, and try and do it. But maybe the capabilities weren’t there. And then you’d partner but maybe that didn’t work out and then you started purchasing. So what was the first acquisition?

Thomas Le Maguer 9:53

So the first acquisition was LinkedIn to Leeds, because we they were doing a lot of LinkedIn lead generation.

Jeremy Weisz 10:03

People requesting that, okay?

Thomas Le Maguer 10:06

Yes, because we’re very, very strong in email. So then opening up that additional social channel would create a greater lift for our customer base, right. And then following that was golden rule growth that did the done for you LinkedIn campaigns in a way that was compliant with LinkedIn. So then it was the next logical step. Right. So that’s kind of how the ball got rolling.

Jeremy Weisz 10:37

So usually the first acquisitions I was making, first of anything that we’re doing, it’s kind of clunky, like, the process isn’t worked out. What did you learn from the first acquisition with LinkedIn to leads that you then started to perfect more going forward?

Thomas Le Maguer 10:56

I think the first acquisition was really around how to do things, how to think outside the box without the constraints of how private equity says it should be done, how MBAs think it should be done, how conventional wisdom thinks it should be done. Because oftentimes, you don’t have a large equity backer, or the perfect environment to go ahead and do an acquisition. And so you need to think about it differently. So creative deal making became important. And one of the things that I believed very strongly from the start was making sure that they shared in Republix stock, so that they wouldn’t just be acquired, but they wouldn’t be part of the larger vision. And that that was something that we just kept on pursuing.

Jeremy Weisz 11:55

Can you just talk about for people a little bit about the structure of the deal itself? And you don’t need to go into specifics? I’m sure all of them are a little bit different. But as far as cash equity stock, how is it structured, when you brought a company in to the Republix platform,

Thomas Le Maguer 12:14

so it evolved over time, but like the typical structure is some cash upfront, some sort of delayed consideration, either in the form of an urn out or a promissory note, and rollover equity, into Republic stock. So just immediate gratification for them for the seller, long term gratification tied to performance, and then second bite at the apple based on the overall vision and what they were joining.

[Continue to Page 2]