Jackson Allan: A Search Fund, No SBA, and a Software Company in 90+ Countries

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Still Searching. Today, I have Jackson Allan. He's the owner and CEO of PassMark Software. Correct me if I got that right, right? Absolutely right. He is a searcher out of Australia, which you will realize really quickly based on his accent, and he acquired a global software company. So, Jackson, thanks for being here. No, it's great to be here and chat. Well, I'm fascinated because we've had a chance to message and DM and chat on LinkedIn for over a year now, and so I feel like I've kind of seen your search develop over time, and I was absolutely excited about six or seven months ago when you said, "Hey, I'm under LOI, and this is an interesting deal. I don't know if it's going to work out." And then now it's been four months, and you've been operating this business. So, let's start at the beginning. Why don't you tell everybody how you discovered this whole niche of business acquisition and why it appealed to you?

Yeah, sure. So, I'd had this background career about 15 years and sales, and it always been aspired to lead a business from the, but also I had a background, family business, my dad built a small business. So, a lot of the ingredients were there. I'd been raised, told, "If you want to build wealth for yourself one day and have independence, you've got to have your own business." So, I was primed for that, and I was doing my MBA here in Australia at Melbourne Business School, and one of the professors there in the class at someone coming who had bought a business and was in the similar space, they, I put out my hand and said, "How would I do this if I wanted to do it?" And they said, "Come and talk to me." And I didn't really think much of that. I got a card and a number. And the professor had said, "There's all

these businesses out there. We're seeing this generational change. There's so much opportunity to pick one up and run with it." So, that was the back of my mind, but my primary stinking at that point in time was I'm going to go and work for McKinsey or one of the big consulting firms do strategic consulting for a few years, get my strategic skill set upgraded, and build a bit of a reputation there, and then come back in the industry. And then I was reading. That's very MBA of you. That's very MBA, right? Yeah, exactly. Because if I'm going to go through the work and mostly just paying to have the MBA, then not taking that top tier recruiting afterwards sounds a little ridiculous. So yeah, everyone's like, "Oh, yeah, I'll go to McKinsey for a couple of years or I'll go to Investment Bank for a couple of years." And then I'll figure out what I really want to do once I've got the ROI on this degree. Yeah. And for me, it wasn't so much of that ROI. I saw it as like a staging point to broaden

my skill set and rebrand myself. I delivered sales leadership results in a big way. I'd taken this business, which was a few million in revenue and converted it to more than 100 million in revenue over seven years, built out the entire sales team, and I kind of ticked that box. And that's what I've done in my career. Sales individual performing as an IC and then as a leader, I performed and hit a home run, so to speak. But I was still branded as the CSO, and I wanted the CEO role, and that was the thinking was I'd go into that consulting environment and then jump back into industry with that reputation and then push into a GM role somewhere. But there was that underlying entrepreneurial piece sitting there, and I actually was on Reddit one day, and I saw this article on Reddit, which was from Bloomberg, I think, MBAs are spurning McKinsey to go and buy small

businesses. I think I read that same article. Right. And you can imagine the Reddit thread. Because Reddit is very critical. So the Reddit thread was, you know, HVAC business owners in five estate, the stick of being called five times a week with someone who wants to buy their legacy. That was sort of like the Reddit thread. But I saw through that, and because I'd been prime, I went to a professor and said, "What's this?" Then I went and read the Young Thurman book, Pete Felegman, who's a thought leader, so to speak, in the Australian search scene, had podcasts. I started listening to those, and two months later, I've read three books, listened to 30 podcasts, and this was what I was going to do, right? Absolutely. So then I just started to look at the plans in place to make it happen. And there was a good opportunity in the business

that I was in at that point in time. It was being spun off and sold to another business. It was sort of like a natural endpoint for me to exit that business. I took a break and traveled around Europe for eight months with my kids, knowing that this next thing that we were going to do is going to be quite intense, which it absolutely is. And then I picked off the search fund raise, actually, at the Barcelona search fund conference, while we were just finishing up in Europe, and that was the end of 2024. Okay. So you're like, "All right, I'm going to go all in on this." And very good of you to take some time with the family ahead of time, just kind of to ease into it a little bit, and you decide you're going to raise the search fund, and this is 2024. So it took you, correct me if I'm wrong, about two years of full time searching then. I started the raise October 2024, and it took me longer. It took nine months to close the raise. And my raise wasn't necessarily textbook in terms of its length. I'd heard other searches

in the U.S. raising in four weeks, which I was really envious of. It took me a lot more hard graft to get my raise closed. And that's just a reflection of where the capital market was for search in Australia at that point in time, the maturity of it, in sort of mid-2024. There'd been a wave of searches for this influx of fresh capital and interest, and this wave of searches in Australia from like 2020 to 2024 had come through, and then investors had started to tap out on capital that they could allocate, and then the second wave of capital was waiting to see what happened. And we're starting, we're still sort of in that phase right now, I'm sorry, but that just made my raise quite tricky. So it took till July to close, but I actually just started searching anyway while I was raising, because raising capital isn't a full-time job, or it shouldn't be. So from January 2025 onwards, I just started

reaching out to businesses that started with interns. I built the whole infrastructure to search and started reaching out to businesses. Australia is a little bit of a different market. You have to take a little bit of a different tack than the U.S. over here, but I built that up. And so you can say that by the time I found the business, which I signed a Heads of Agreement, which you guys call an LOI, in October 2025. So it was about 10 months from like starting pounding the pavement to actually signing that LOI, and I closed the fundraise midway. Okay. Well, that's good, because you got the fundraise in as you're coming up on the agreement. What does that search ecosystem look like in Australia? Because I'm very familiar with the U.S. I'm semi-familiar with Europe, especially from out here. It's always like, we've got a pretty robust on-market presence with M&A brokers, smaller business brokers, but there

still has to be a very heavy proprietary search funnel. What does this look like in Australia? When I think about the ecosystem, I think about it in three parts. I have the businesses and maybe your M&A advisors and intermediaries, brokers fall into that bucket along with the availability of businesses. Then you have the investors and the capital availability, and then you have the operator searches, maybe the third leg of that school. Australia is very similar to Europe. Because we don't have an SBA loan program like the U.S. can, that means that the changes, the dynamic banks here in Australia are hesitant to cash flow loans. So, debt availability is trickier than in some other country, which means most searches will need to, unless they can fully fund it themselves, raise capital to investors. They'll

usually be able to get debt funding, but not to the extent that you see in some U.S. deals that are highly leveraged going in. So, that just changes the dynamic a little bit. There are probably less self-funded searches in the U.S. than there are in Australia. Yeah, that's what I would expect. But there are still more self-funded searches than there are traditional searches because that ecosystem is developing slowly as well. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What did you find was the hardest part of your search? Outside of capital raising, what was the hardest aspect of actually building out an effective search to identify your target? Yeah, I could probably answer that question about the searching piece, and I can probably answer that question about getting the deal done. They're probably different answers. But if we focus on the search itself, the hard

part was finding a business that would meet all of the search fund criteria that a traditional search fund investor wants to see. You're raising capital. That creates an expectation that you're going to find something a bit better than perhaps what a self-funded searcher would see. There's an expectation that you will do proprietary outreach because, honestly, the investors in Australia, if a deal's coming up through one of the brokers, they'll see it through someone. So, they want to see a deal flow they wouldn't have seen otherwise. And you have to go out and do that proprietary outreach, which is the hard part in Australia is you cannot scale in the same way as you can. Let's take HVAC, for example, as a category that a lot of searchers will look at at some point. In the US, how many HVAC, if you wanted

to do national HVAC, how many targets would there be? Millions, yeah. Millions, right? So, in Australia, HVAC for me, once I created the list that I used externally, Jen, partners who support on this, they had 100 targets in HVAC that had employee numbers between 10 employees and 100, and even 10s too low. Really, there's going to be around 30, 40 employees before they start to get into that zone where the EBITDA is going to be between two and five million. If you're doing self-funded search, you obviously go smaller. So, maybe your size is going to be a little bit larger. But we're talking about the difference between 100 companies and as you described millions, which maybe is a little bit... Yeah, it's probably a little high. There's probably hundreds of thousands, but the point still remains, yeah. It's really tricky to do an industry-focused search. So, swinging back to the original question,

what makes it so hard? What makes it hard is that it's really hard in Australia to get scale, and so then it's hard to build authority in a particular industry that then enables you to have those strong proprietary conversations, because Australian business owners, actually US business owners are pretty similar in terms of their noble spirit. And if you rock up and you start trying to pretend you know something about their industry, they'll quickly sniff out that you don't. They'll look at your LinkedIn profile and all the other information they can find about you and their online presence and work out why should I sell my business to this guy. And to me, that varying lies the crux and the hard part of searching Australia is kind of getting that scale to then connect with the business owner with proprietary outreach to then get to the next stage is finding LOI. No, that makes total sense. And then once you've found the deal and you get that LOI or agreement signed, as you said, what does that diligence phase look like? Because typically

you were expecting to see there's going to be legal review, there's going to be quality earnings, financial review. So as you're going through diligence, you know, what were some of the things that were difficult and some of the things you didn't expect? It wasn't too difficult in Australia to find people who could support, you know, there's plenty of consulting firms that will conduct financial due diligence. There's a few legal firms that have popped up that will do fixed fee stage diligence programs with success fees that allow you to kind of stage your diligence in a way that you're not going to blow your entire budget accidentally on a deal that you find a red flag on. To me, the hard part was actually staging diligence and moving fast enough that I didn't frustrate the vendor. But I moved fast enough that we also didn't lose the deal from deal fatigue. It took nine months for us to close, if I'm counting correctly. And you've got

to throw a Christmas in there and everyone shuts down over Christmas period. Christmas is a bit longer of a break in Australia than what it is in North America, just because it's our summer break, so to speak. So you kind of lose four to six weeks of Christmas. Suffice to say, we were very fatigued by March, April, when it came to getting to the finish line. Yeah, nine months of exclusivity. That sounds pretty rough. Yeah, I think I had four months of exclusivity, but by the time we got to that point, I think the vendor, I don't know if you'd like to go through it again. And so he had other offers. I think he wanted to sell to me and not to someone else in the end, which meant that I was not so worried about that exclusivity clause. Yeah, it's funny. It doesn't matter if you're searching in Europe or the United States or apparently even in Australia, having that personal connection with the seller, that really

makes a huge difference because that can cover over who they decide to pick, the deal structure, the capital. A lot of things can be kind of glossed over if the seller is like, you know what? You're my guy. You're my gal. I want to sell to this person. Absolutely. And that came through when we announced to the team in the time since that the vendor is still in the business for days a week and sits behind me in the office. We get along well. We've got a relationship that's been built through lots of pragmatic work that we've done. And he's unfortunate that he's quite pragmatic and low ego. And that's really helped if you haven't been like that. He had other offers, which he had turned down. And I know that he didn't want the business to just become a part of a software holding

company like a constellation or he was also concerned if there was going to be like a VC style investment where someone came in and tried to really grow the business much faster than what it would be able to handle and potentially break it. So yeah, he's very much looking, he's very much looking for that traditional searcher who like, you know, wants to take over, wants to grow the business. And without sounding too cliche, wants to steward their legacy going forward. Yeah. You know, there really are sellers out there vendors who want that. Yeah. And there's some other factors that I can't share in this forum that sort of factor into that as well around I think around his decision and why. And for me now when I talk to people about what matters when you're looking, I say, you know, it really matters that you

trust the vendor and you've got a good relationship with the vendor that just shines through me so much. Whereas if you had to ask me sort of based on my textbooks, reading and experience, I probably wouldn't have necessarily really appreciated that as much. But once you've been through the trenches with that vendor, you really come to appreciate how important that relationship is and how important it is that you trust them. And so that was a very fortunate part of my deal was, and it's fortunate that we're still getting along and we're working well together, but it's a long journey. And you know, you have to keep being pragmatic on the way through in order to kind of retain that relationship. But we're a deeply technical business. And the vendor quite enjoys the technical aspect of the work and the business. And so it was important to me and important to the investors that that we structured the

deal in a way that he was still keen to participate through the lifecycle of the ownership and operating business. Yeah, I think you really hit on the key there where, you know, a lot of searchers realize that the transition is really important, but they don't really understand how vital it is to have a solid relationship with the seller. You know, before the sale actually happens because you can do all the due diligence in the world, but you're always going to have an informational disadvantage to the seller. They're always going to know more about the business than you. And if you can't trust that person, then you can't trust the deal. But more importantly, after the sale, like the fact that you're able to have that relationship where you can work together, that transition is so important, so vital as so many things are changing. Really glad to hear that you're able to build that kind of relationship and actually move the business forward. I'm sure you've been in the business like 120 days now, like about four months. And yeah,

I can't imagine how much more difficult that would be if you didn't have that level of support. No, absolutely. And there's a bit of luck meets preparation here, right? I think this is something you could, you can work towards finding this and then be pragmatic and emotionally intelligent yourself through the process to facilitate a relationship. You definitely got to leave your own ego at the door. That will really put you in a much better position. I don't pretend that there's not a mix of luck and preparation here, right? I think some searches go in and they do all the right things. And then there's just a level of uncertainty in this space when it comes to this, that you have to accept and move forward with irrespective of, I mean, obviously you should make that gut instinct call, like, do I trust this person and then that call might be misplaced. But some searches are going to get unlucky, right?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes there's nothing you can do to prevent that. And sometimes you look back and hindsight is beautiful, but it is hindsight. So we don't have that. So you're exactly right. You have to get to a point to where you've got all the information and you have to make a gut call. And to be fair, that's what ownership is all about. Like, you are making a lot of gut calls as you go. And so, you know, hopefully it's a good one. Yeah. And look, by the time you get to this stage, you've made so many gut calls. And going back to your question around, what did you find most difficult about the search? I split into two parts and talked about the search being difficult in Australia just because of the nature of the market. But if you ask me, what's difficult about the, like, actually closing the deal, like, LOI to your first day in the business, to me, it's the velocity of consequential decisions that you get hit with day after day after day. And it's not just a business, right? This is your life. And depending on your personal situation as

a searcher, perhaps you've got children and spouse that are on for the ride. And you're making decisions that affect everyone with low information where you're committing to something that's going to be a decade or more of your life. And to me, that's what's hard about that part of the search is just the sheer velocity that you get hit with those decisions, that which can be quite fatiguing. And it's in that space when you can potentially make a poor decision, right? To me, that's the challenge from LOI to close. Yeah, I could not agree more. That deal fatigue is real. And a lot of times, searchers don't realize it until they get 12 months plus into their search. And then they're like, oh my goodness, that the the sheer inbound of decisions that to make over and over and over. At some point, you're like, you know what, fine, I'll just sign it. And that's where mistakes happen. And you mentioned earlier that you had a pretty good network from the University at Melbourne.

You mentioned Peter, you mentioned some other people. It sounded like you at least had a good support system. So as you're going through, you're like, and you obviously had your investors. And so you probably had people who were like, Hey, I'm having trying to make some decisions around, you know, this particular issue or this particular topic, you know, what's your feedback on that? And so it sounds like you're able to lean on some people as you are going. Absolutely. You know, I'm a voracious networker. When I was in that eight month period, whereas telling with around Europe with my my wife and kids, we wrote to the law, we probably did that 2000 pages or 20,000 miles in car. I must have listened to like hundreds of pod cars on search and probably too much information. But you did it the right way. You did it the right way because we're very used to road tripping out here in the States. And when my wife and I lived in Germany, we were there for three years and we would road trip all those ways. We drove all the way to Stockholm, we drove to Paris, we're driving down to Italy, and the Europeans think you're nuts. They're like, how could you possibly drive that far? I'm

like, this was a day, this was a weekend, you know, is that like, anyway, sorry, yes. No, look, you know, Australia, some people in the US might not realize this, but Australia geographically is actually very similar size to like the contiguous United States, we cut the Alaska off, and then we're relatively so we're used to driving long distances as well. But that's actually really good preparation time to just throw a podcast on and listen to you. And you can do it on your commute as well. The other thing I did was jump on search funder, and I was unapologetic in reaching out to anyone and everyone who would talk to me, I met with like, maybe 20 people in the US just on calls where we would jump on and I'd asked them what they were doing and how this search was going and maybe I spoke to them once. But I, but I had that network there. Yeah, I was one of them. That's how we met. Yeah, that's good, right? Like, hey, let's get on a call, you know, and we're so fortunate, the community that surrounds us in this space are willing to give their time

and there's a real culture of paying it forward. The other thing I did was I went to the search conference in Barcelona. And I met with people in the lead up to that, then I met them at the event, they were raising search funds. To me, there's a real benefit in finding people who are in your cohort that are going to be solving the same problems as you in the same time. There's a real benefit to the people who are ahead of you, and the people who are behind you, like support the people who are coming up behind you, talk to the people who are ahead of you. But particularly the search game, which maybe we can get into at some point in this conversation, the search game is changing so fast with technology that the advice that you'll get from me, even me, like from like, 18 months ago, it's going to be stale. There will be some generic things that carry across, but you need to have that network of other people who are searching at the same time, you can bounce off each other. And it

can really help if you have people oversee, because they'll bring a different perspective to it. And also, they're not necessarily competing with you for investors or dealflowers. And look, the community is very giving and generous. But at some point, there's potential that searchers who are in the same market will clash with you, and you might not feel comfortable telling them all about your deal. But I was quite happy to talk to my friends in Poland and India about my deal, and we could talk about it down to the end degree, and I was quite comfortable with that, and really helped having that stand on board when I'd be frustrated that it's coming in 11 o'clock at night, and they'll be on the WhatsApp chatting to them. So I really highly recommend people go outside of their network, find people that are, like, sorry, outside of their country, find people that are in their cohort, as well as people who are outside of it. I still networked a lot with searches in Australia, really got strong relations with a lot of searches in Australia, and we support each other a lot.

But I think there was just a sense of, you know, I can't tell you every detail about the deal that I'm in, and having that international network helps with that. Yeah, it's obviously so much easier now to have that international network as markets in Europe and Australia and the United States are all kind of growing, you know, independently, but still growing. And you're right, there's been so much change, especially on the proprietary side just over the last two years. I remember, like, when I started searching again in January of 25, you know, I like you, I originally had like a group of interns that we were pouring through data, it's like, it's all very manual. And then in January 25, I was like, man, I wonder how much of this I can automate, I wonder how much I can actually like, I can build up some real systems. And I have just been shocked since then, because it seems like now, especially with, you know, some AI tooling we have, I mean, things are changing every month. And it's amazing how much more data access you can get your hands on.

No, absolutely. When I think back to, you know, Q1 2025, I was, I had interns, and I was having them operate AI to do industry research, and they would come up with what we call ISRs, I think you call them ISRs, I can't even remember what it stood for now, but it was just like it was a two, it was a two page brief on an industry with all these attributes around the industry and questions to ask vendors in that, in that industry segment. And I would say to them, look, you know, you, you're going to win not on the basis in your career of your ability to find information, it's going to be your ability to like synthesize information and separate out signal from the noise, make decisions. And so we would get on calls and I would have them, you know, doing, you know, critical thinking tasks and

really pushing them on that. I really enjoyed that aspect. And I'm actually really proud like, like three of my interns out of maybe six have gone on and gotten into investment banking and private equity. And one of them has actually gone into Harvard Business School. So yeah, so I'm like, that's a part of my search that I'm really proud of. Anyway, getting back to the original point about search moving really fast is all the work that they did in Q1 2025 around that industry research could be automated. I just wouldn't even need to bring them in to do that because now with Claude, OpenAI, ChatGPT, the level of automation there and the ability to go and get data elsewhere, bring it back in Richard and Luke is a lot a lot better than what it was. And even in Q1 2025, it was sort of halfway there. And a lot of the time they would be sense checking the answers. Like, does it really make sense

that Australian Australia has like, you know, 10,000 security businesses, probably not right. So let's let's think check that that industry, you're right. It was like, it was, it was right before front. And if I remember correctly, it was like ChatGPT, like 3.6 or something like that. And you're right, I was using, I remember I was using a lot of like automation tooling like n8n, along with like, you know, cloud hooks and Python scripts and like really building these like workflows and stuff. And I did have one intern when I first started, but it's funny because like, it was, it was complicated and it would break all the time and I was constantly fixing things. And it was great leverage at the time. But now it's like a five minute prompting Claude Code and I'm done. It's not even the same environment. It's like, it's amazing how much has changed just in a year. Yeah, I remember when OpenAI came out with this, like they called it operator or something. And I think it was like an agent tool. I don't know if it still exists. We use port in our

business. But I was like, oh, okay, you know, what if I set up like, I'm going to open four operator with like, first I opened up one operator window and tried to get it to do lead research and fill out like a Google sheet spreadsheet with leads and go and find an enriched information to generate leads for me. And, and it was all over the place. It would make all these areas, it would be choose that it couldn't even, it would get the first line. And then as soon as you get to about the third row, it would, it would completely rub the track and mess in context. And I was like, okay, you know, I'm going to split up. I'm going to split this up into jobs. So you're going to be operator one and an open four operator windows. And that's like basically what agents do now, right? You give them tasks so you can minimize the context. You know, agent was like, okay, I tried to get that to work. I was like, this is amazing. But it was, it was the setup cost wasn't worth the scaling. I use the A is overseas or lead gen enrichment. But honestly, like, I probably could have

just gotten away with using we not lemlist. I'm trying to remember the name of you've got clay, I think in the US, which is pretty good place. It plays great. It's a really great option for a lot of searchers on the enrichment side. Yeah. And then there's another tool that I use Apollo. I think it was Apollo. Yeah. Yeah. Apollo is really popular. And I keep reminding people that it's not great. But you know, it was better than Clay in Australia. Right. So it's probably not equal across all market or maybe I like I didn't use play too much that maybe I'm sticking outside of school there. But I'm demonstrating here also why it's actually not that useful to ask me about how to search. Now, because my my knowledge is already stable. Yeah, I can't. And that's also because I can't remember because so much has happened in all things. But but suffice to say that it changing incredibly quickly, you can do so much more yourself now. Having said that, so can everyone else. Exactly. Yeah.

Right. It's not a it's not a point of advantage. And and you have to find out what your point of advantage is going to be when you're doing your stuff. Yeah, you're so right. And that's why I tell people now I'm like, I think the the information is just table stakes. And you know, all the things that would have prevented even self-funded searchers who didn't have the resources, they would prevented them from building like robust proprietary search funnels. That's gone. Like you can you can do that yourself now. And so the real difference now like one, it's amazing how many searchers haven't realized that yet and haven't taken advantage of it. And then for the ones that do now the soft skills really matter, you know, so if we all have the same information, if we're all like running through similar lists, if I can find the same databases you are, then it really does come down to that phone call that meeting that, you know, getting coffee with an owner like, how am I actually going to structure and negotiate and all those soft skills really do matter so much more now. Yeah. The other thing I think people are underutilizing is their online presence, right? There's sort of online brand. You really have to put yourself out there. And I do that a lot. People who

followed me on LinkedIn or if you go and check me out on LinkedIn and trawl through my old post, you'll see that I would go running in the city that I was in. I would do like I would just record really raw, sweaty, like this is what's happening. Hey, is my thoughts on this business issue or is what's happening in my search. And the point about that, there was two points to doing that. One was that it demonstrated I'm a real person and I'm not fallible. I'm human, but damn, I try hard. I really work hard and that matters to vendor who is going to Google you and look at your online presence that they're going to trust you with their legacy. Yeah. And it gives them something to find. It gives them something to find to where they can actually see the authentic you as opposed to just, you know, a profile photo and a couple sentences and resume. And it makes a huge difference. I know that, you know, like I said, I've got a several dozen, you know, connections with searchers in Australia growing all the

time because it's such a dynamic market. And I don't think I ever saw any of them as open online as you were. Like that's the reason why we started, like why we had our first phone call and why we're talking now because you made you made it a point that are like, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to get out there. I'm going to, you know, make, make sure people know who I am and connect with as many people as you can because that creates serendipity. It creates authenticity. And I think you're absolutely right. I think searchers really do need to put themselves out there a lot more than they used to. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was my approach. Let me certainly work for everyone, you know, you have to find their kind of their own style. And certainly my sales career and going from sales person to a leader helps. But one thing that I realized when I became a sales leader, it's actually my way. It's not the only way, right? I observed some sales people who in meetings, why would you say that? Or like this person's really not the greatest communicator. And I would try and coach someone communication. And later on, I dropped it because I realized

like, I don't think it actually matters. So I like, I had one sales rep who, who like, he did the numbers, right? Like incredibly, he just did the numbers. And it didn't matter that he walked into a call and said some awkward things. The customer always almost see how hard he was willing to work to win their business. And then how hard we worked because he did to hold on to it. And, and so sometimes the signal matters kind of more. But, but the point other people might find something works differently. For me, I was always very transparent with owners. You know, I always told them the challenges that, that I would have in terms of closing the deal with them. I was always transparent about how a search fund works, about how the, how the capital raise would work and how like, I didn't like technically have the money in the bank at that point in time ready to go. Right? I was always open and really transparent and clear about all of that. I never tried to like get them to sign LOI and then get them halfway through LOI. And then they realized like, Oh, actually,

like you have to go and raise the phone. Yeah, you never, you never put on this front that like you're, you're really like a micrope fund and everything's fine. And it, because even after you finish your raise, that's just the search raise, because you still have to go back and pitch the deal to the investors and actually get the full acquisition amount. And so it's really important that you're very transparent. And that's a very difficult conversation for a lot of searchers to have because they feel like they're always, because they are, they're walking this line between, trust me, I can close. And by the way, maybe I can, you know, so it's like, it's a very difficult line to walk and you have to do it with confidence. And I think you're right. The only way you can do that respectfully is just as transparent as you possibly can be. Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, all this sort of stuff matters, right? Like the, the, the track record that you have that you can talk to the owner about around like your grit, your tenacity and the fact that you will not give up on this deal and that you raise that capital, right? Like, you know, like, I couldn't promise that I would do it, but I could promise

that I would die trying. That's different. And, and I think that, that authenticity helped me and, and potentially is, and I, I haven't had this conversation with the vendor I bought from, but potentially, you know, there's, there's something there around like I extracted what, because I went out with that, that's the sort of vendor that I filtered out in my process, because the way that you run your search is a bit of a filter. Yeah, it is going to find, right? And just like, just like with the vendor, you know, you realize after you're in it that a business tends to be the direct reflection of its owner. And so, you know, and the business is going to reflect them, you know, not just how they operate. It's, it reflects their values. It reflects their character. It reflects what they stand for. And so when you approach your search in the same way, you tend to attract those types of people at the same time, because, you know, you can kind of see through people.

We all have this weird, like EQ feeling from when someone's given us a lot of BS, and they're like, hmm, this feels off, and it just doesn't work. And so, yeah, what you put out there is what you tend to attract. Absolutely. The other thing about having the online presence is, you know, I would connect with intermediaries and brokers, and you can connect with them on LinkedIn. People talk about how if you want to run the, the, the sort of intermediary channel, what is it called in search that's when it's not proprietary, you, you do, yeah, it's on market. So it's, it's got some sort of representation, maybe a broker, maybe M&A advisor, maybe an investment bank, especially if you're on a search fund level, you know, there's might be that middle market investment bank who's, who's, you know, putting the deal forward. And you know that the textbooks will tell you, you know, you've got to build relationships there and you've got to touch base with those people regularly to make sure you're still getting deal flow with that channel. You've got to build a reputation with them. I would meet those people for coffee or have a conversation with a phone, add them on LinkedIn. And then

I wouldn't necessarily follow up with them again, but they would see my running content on LinkedIn. And, and I was, and I was getting inbound deal flow from those intermediaries because, but oh yeah, Jackson's looking to buy a business because I've seen him on LinkedIn 10 times and I'm frankly fed up with hearing him telling me that I'm trying, he's trying to buy a business, but hey, I'll throw him this. I am right. And, and so just having that online presence helps you keep in people's, um, in, in their, um, sphere so that I remember you when they're thinking about who am I going to send it by into it. It's so much more effective too, because like if you're just, if you're active online, usually that's LinkedIn, but it can be other places, Searchfunder is a great place, but if you're active online and people know who you are, and then more importantly, they know what you're looking for so that when they see something, they think of you and, uh, then, you know, it's so much more effective than you just filling their inbox with like a cold email every three weeks. We've got plenty of that. We're good to go. And so I've seen the same

thing. Like I make it really clear. I'm like, Hey, I'm searching in GovCon. Everybody knows I'm searching in GovCon. They know me as the GovCon guy and I'm, I'm very, you know, active on LinkedIn. And so just like you, like I get DMs every week of people who are like, Hey, I found this GovCon business. Hey, I've got, you know, and so you're right. That's where a lot of that deal flow can start coming in naturally if you just get out there and make let people know like who you are and that you're alive and still searching and interested. That's it. And I couldn't even remember because you know, we sell to some government customers in the US, right? And I reached out to them and I was like, Oh, let's talk about it. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, in my mind, you know, that, uh, and it almost I felt like I'd gotten to know you to a degree, break down a lot of barriers just through like observing your, your, your online content, which you post a lot of it as well. And I do think that's underutilized. I can see why some searches feel a little bit apprehensive about putting themselves out there, particularly when maybe they're trying to rebrand or recreate themselves from their historic career reinvent themselves. And that can feel a little bit difficult when

you've got all your old colleagues on, on online. And you also get very public. So if you do fail and things don't work out, then you, you have to, you have to deal with that. So it does, it does feel, it does feel a bit risky, but I think people just have to trust in themselves that like it's okay. And that, and that you will actually be able to parlay that into whatever the next thing is, which, which you are an example of that, right? Like, you know, um, uh, and the, um, but yeah, there's, to me, the, the benefits of putting yourself out there, outweigh it. And the other thing I just point out on that is, I think back to an old friend I had through university and she was a policy advisor for a politician and she taught me about this rule called like the vomit rule or the vomit principle, which is that, um, if you saying something doesn't make you feel like you're going to vomit, then

you haven't achieved cut through. So a politician, right? If they haven't been on message, on their point, so much that it makes them feel they're going to spew, then they probably haven't achieved cut through. So if you haven't told people online that you're seeking to buy a beaded, like a GovCon business, like to the point where like staying, it makes you feel like you're cringing, then you probably haven't said enough. And actually the people on the other side are probably not think like you will feel yourself that you've overdone it, but other people are probably only just getting that impression of like, Oh, okay. Yeah. And now I've heard it twice, whereas you've said it 200 times. Yeah, there's millions of people out there. And so every time we say something, we feel like we're saying it again. But in reality, 99% of the people who hear you have never heard you before and they're hearing it for the first time. And so I absolutely could not agree more. And it really does make a big difference. And it's not easy. Like I understand where that comes from. It's still not easy for me. It still makes my stomach turn a little bit. But you're right. The benefits

are way higher, you know, in, you know, whether that means deal flow, whether that means connecting with, you know, like-minded people like yourself, or, you know, whether that means being able to help somebody else out, you know, it's amazing how, and we see it on social media, the vast majority of people do not post anything ever. And so if you put yourself out there just a little bit, it really can go a long way. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been amazing and phenomenal. And I appreciate it. But now, Mr, you are the CEO of PassMark. I got that right. PassMark solutions or software? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. PassMark software. So tell us a little bit about PassMark and what it's been like now that you're the guy in the seat. Sure. So PassMark, 27 year old software business that was started by a computer science technical founder back in the late nineties. And it does a range of different products that stem from his payability and the payability that's been built up in the business to operate at the hardware software interface through a low level between those

two. And the way that's manifested itself in products today is roughly a third of the business is a digital forensics product called OSForensics. And that's used by law enforcement agencies around the world to extract evidence from desktop computers in a way that's admissible in court. So the California DOJ is a customer. We have customers across the US at the federal level, the state level that utilize that software. And then the other two thirds of the business is what I would call like diagnostics, benchmarking and performance testing of computer components. We have three software products that's been under that that test all the components in your computer from your RAM to your hard drive to your CPU, your GPU. And we have another set of hardware products which predominantly test USB ports for power delivery speed. And

where we're working on testing cable quality for USB cable quality. And we sell that around the world. Like if you name a brand, a technology brand, we have done business with them. And to me, that's incredible, right? Here's a little business in Sydney. And, you know, I'm in calls with Nvidia, Microsoft, Dell, like the Nintendo Sony place. I thought you name a technology brand and we've done some business with them along the way. And we've got this sort of great platform customer base to build off. And really, the business has built these great products. And now I'm in the business, we're looking at what more can we do with our, you know, existing customers? And how can we improve our products to do even more with them? So it's like an exciting place to be. And I love to nerd out on the stuff like I've been in technical businesses in the past. And, and so it's been really fun to learn all the different, the different technical aspects I've learned about electronics,

engineering and computer science to a depth that I never thought I would. But yeah, it's been great. So, but there's, it's a complex business that operates across Australia. And we have so we have team in Australia based in Sydney, I have a team member in Japan, we have team members in the U.S. And we have, you know, half of our business comes from the U.S. And the other half comes from this sort of pale of 90 plus countries. So we, it's amazing. Yeah, it's we just, and, and the business has never really done much outbound. It's predominantly been sort of customers coming to us on the pool strength of the products alone. So the product has done a lot of the work. And, and there's an opportunity to go out and do outbound and work with our customers to understand what more we can do with them. So it's an exciting place to be, right? Wow, that's really incredible, especially, you know, it's not common that a, that a, a searcher, even a traditional search is going

to find a business that has that level of global impact, you know, like across the United States and Europe, like you said, 90-some countries, you've got customers. That's amazing. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I remember, and if you look at our website, like people listening should go and look at the website. And this is testament to like, if you've ever watched Glengarry Glen Ross, and if you're searching, you should watch Glengarry Glen Ross, but there's this character in there who complains about the quality of the lead. And you see this in sales, right? Sales who like to lead the graph. It's not a fault of the leads graph. If you looked at past my business, you would probably walk past it, right? Like if you just looked at the website, you would probably walk past it. It's testament to like never walk past lead. Always just look. I got on the phone with the vendor and he starts walking me through the business. He'd responded to one of my sort of drip campaign outreaches. And I was just blown away in his presentation that he did to me. And in terms of like what

the business was doing, and we ended up on the phone for two hours, when it meant to be 30 minute intro call, which was a good sign. And then, you know, a month later, I'd met him in person. We'd signed a heads of agreement. And we were off and running. Wow. And then you're late because the more you look at it, you're like, this is much bigger than I expected. This is much more detailed than I expected. And a lot of searchers, they don't necessarily look in software space anymore. Like, I know that used to be very popular about a decade ago. And then it felt like the multiples really just kind of got away from us. And then, you know, now with, you know, the last couple of years with the impact of AI, I don't know if I've, if I've met another searcher, even on the traditional side, who has been actively working in like the, the software, even the hardware space. And it just seems like it's much more rare these days. I wasn't looking in a software space. You know, I have this sort of like, I have this sort of stream that's run through my career because my dad tried to start a tech business.

He was, he was with a government organization here in Australia in his career and worked in their computing IT area. So, so I had that, that technical bend, but I wasn't looking for software business. I hadn't worked in software. I just was like, okay, well, you know, I'm going to go and reach out to software businesses and see what I find. But, but we are a software business. We're also like a testing business. You know, we build tools for testing. And I've been in some spaces where you do do testing. And so I think that mistake would need to think that like a software business is just this homogenous type of business that all fits into a category. And actually you could find some really weird niche business like PassMark that kind of sits on, on this kind of edge case. And you are looking for the edge cases. Yeah, that's where they're really good at just for the value, right? Right. You're looking for the thing that's hiding in plain sight. And you're right. I

always talk to searchers, everyone, a lot of times they have these ideas of industries that they're interested in. And I'm like, yes, definitely start with those. But dive in because what you're going to discover is there's going to be weird little sub niches and sub niches of sub niches that you've never heard of before. And that's where a lot of the value happens to be that the place is like, you know, if you find something truly amazing, it's probably somewhere that you did not know existed when you started your search. Yeah, really. And that's possibly a trap that I can see you as searchers getting into more often because if you if you build this machine for volume outreach, you need to feed that machine volume. And so then you choose an industry and businesses that have a certain type of criteria. And in doing that, you create this bias and you search where you push out the stuff that sits on the edges because you're like, well, I can't feed that into that funnel because it doesn't fit those criteria. And and that's the risk with doing that industry, you know, focused search is you're not going to find stuff that sits in

no that doesn't sit in a clear category. Yeah, absolutely. And so now I know you've been traveling the globe as this brand new CEO, meeting customers, meeting team members all over the world. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like you're enjoying it so far. Maybe not all of the travel, but you're enjoying the business. What has been give you give me one thing that was a positive surprise that you didn't expect. I mean, granted you're only four months in. And then, you know, kind of tell me like, you know, what's one of the things like maybe even maybe not a negative side, but like something that's been a little more challenging that you also did not expect. Like because I think one of the things that a lot of searchers understandably, their questions are, you know, what it's really like, what is it really like? Like, you know, once you're actually in the seat, what is that actually like when you when you feel the weight of the P&L? And you know, you're you're actually making the decisions every day. You know what? First, it's so much better than search. You know, in the search phase, this is uncertainty about whether it's going to happen. Your deal

can live or die any day, right? You're just waiting for that phone call event. If there's how I change my mind, the when you're in the business every day, right? Like today, I'm going to go and do many things today that create value. Like and I will see the impact of that today. And you know, when you work in a big corporate and you want to make decisions that make things happen, things are slow to move. Like, no, like the business moves at the pace that you can move that sort of like you can just run hard. And the business comes with like for the most part, the business comes with you. And that's awesome. And it's that feeling of being able to have that kind of impact. I work harder and longer hours than what I did during the search. But I'm less straight. Yeah, a lot of the uncertainty is kind of on the back burner. It gives you something to focus on, you know, like business, there's always uncertainty, but like, hey, this one's mine. And now I know what to do today. And next week, and this quarter and next quarter. Yeah. And I'm just going to, and I'm just going to execute, right? Yeah. And that's a great

place to be in. Positive about the business so far in the business that I was in, I found like ways that we create value for customers that we were not selling, right? So to a degree. And I've been able to parlay those into products that are going to be like actually real contributors to the business going forward. So it was, you know, things that I didn't find into everyone talks about like, oh, you know, you're going to find these, you know, icebergs or hidden issues in the business. And I would say that that swings both ways. You can find great things in the business. And I found some things which, which are going to be real revenue drivers for the business going forward that overlooked, right? Where I can see that the customer valued it and so like, okay, well, let's turn this into a product, like a real product and install it properly. And we're doing that. So there's been pleasant surprise there in terms of new products that we're going to create that, that, I mean, we don't

have to put a lot of effort into creating it and they're going to generate revenue for the business, right? So that's, that's a positive thing. The, the, just meeting with the customers has been great, right? You know, I mentioned the caliber of customer and, you know, traveling around the world and going to, you know, we've been to China when visited places that manufacture all the, all the stuff that we all play around with every day. Right. So that's technology. We've, we've been through those, some of those plants and met with people that, that, that's been exciting to kind of be in that sort of thing, see where that's happening. And we're, we're, you know, with the AI infrastructure build out, there's a lot happening in that space in a moment. For some of our customers, like your home PC user that likes to play computer games, there's an customer of ours that's not necessarily a positive thing because now it costs them $10,000 to build what used to cost $3,000. Right. The, but by just being

in that space for the infrastructure build out, it's really exciting. The, the, the, the challenges in the business, you know, it's probably not the right forums, like digging into all the, the challenges that we have. That's fair. You're still operating in real life right now. So I don't want you to just all your, all your dirty work with everybody. Yeah, that, that's right. But you know, it's, it's not without actually, it's not without its challenges. Absolutely. Right. There are hard days, where you just, you have stuff that you weren't expecting that you, you need to work through and that's going to happen only to pretend it's all rosy. But it's just, you know, you've, you've spent your career in business. You're, you're, this is what you're trained for. Right. This is, you, you, you practice, you, you cloned all your skills that, and now you're, you're operating the business in the hot day. Right. You're playing the game, you're stepping up to the plate and there's just, that's a great place to be. Yeah. That's a great place to be. Well,

with that in mind, I imagine that the vast majority of people who are watching this or listening to this are either currently neck deep in their own search, or they're like testing around and trying to figure out if this is the right path for them. And while I can't answer that question for them, that's no question only, only they can answer. What kind of advice would you give to either people who are kind of thinking about getting into this, you know, acquisition space or those who are actively searching right now? People who are actively searching should be able to pull a fair bit of advice from the conversation we've had. Right. They can reach out to me. I, I often share like a, getting started in search guidebook that I've pulled together by recording a lot of these conversations with searches and then getting AI to pass it and build me a little book of all the insights to share that I share with people. If I reach out on LinkedIn, I'm happy to do that as well.

The people who are thinking about this should definitely create massive contact area with the space through meeting with people, listening to podcasts, reading books and getting the, the true picture of what search looks like and not just the, the glossy version that they might get on a new cell approach. It's really important that people understand what's an all right. It's a great thing search, right? It's a great opportunity for people to get into, but it has its upsides and it has its downsides. You've got to understand both before you make a decision as to whether or not you're going to, to get into it and you have to make sure it's right for you individually. And it was right for me for a lot of reasons because of various aspects of my career and upbringing. It's not going to be right for everyone. It's important that people understand that, right? I think this is really consider their opportunity cost. Really consider their opportunity cost, right? And make some, some really strong calls

around, am I doing this because it's going to be better for me long term? Or am I doing this because of the, the sort of sometimes, and I have observed this where maybe I would, I would think that the motivations are not sustainable. Yeah. Right. If you're doing this because you, getting caught in the hype. Yeah. If you're doing it because you want the title where you're doing this because you think it's like a quick way to financial independent. Those are not enough. Those, yeah. Yeah. Those are way, I could not have said it better myself. I mean, it's not for everyone. And you need to figure out if this is for you and just be really, really sober about the pros and the cons because there are real risks involved. And once you, like, once you get past like the gloss, the glossy exterior and you see like, you know, what is, what it really takes and what it's really involved and, and, and you make that decision, then, you know, you'll have a much better understanding of like if this is the right fit or not. And I could have said it better, like blast area,

expand that as much as possible. Yeah. Because, you know, otherwise you'll get caught up in the survivorship bias. It doesn't just be in the search fund space. It exists in the VC space where we tend to focus on people like myself, who, who preparation meets luck. Right. And you can have all the preparation and none of the luck and you won't get to where I am. Right. And then if you're making this decision on the basis of just looking at the winners, then you are not making the right decision. Yeah. It's so easy, especially online to look around and it feels like everybody's winning. And that's why I've, I've really made it a point to like highlight a lot of the voices and feel, Hey, you know, sometimes this doesn't work out. And it's not because they're stupid or lazy. Sometimes people are just really unlucky. And so, you know, we say risk, but risk is real. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it would be a mistake to think that the people who didn't succeed were not wildly talented because they are, work their asses off because they did. And they just, you know,

there's an element of luck. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Jackson. Thank you so much for the time. I know this was incredibly valuable for at least one person out there. I know I really enjoyed it because I love hearing more, especially not just your search, but like about the Australian market and how it's been growing so rapidly. Is LinkedIn the best place for people to reach out to you if they want to get in touch with you or learn a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely. People reach out to me, LinkedIn. I'm very happy to quickly share the, the sort of getting started in search guidebook that I send people. It's like an informal thing. And I, I don't expect anything from it. If people want to dive deeper with me and I would suggest that this is just good advice. Generally, when you're reaching out to people in this space is think about what that person can uniquely offer you in terms of advice. I love giving advice, but I feel that it's even better when it's advice that they couldn't have gotten from someone else. Right. And, and so if someone's done a cursory level of research, I'm quite busy operating the business that, that, that I'm still very

open to connecting, but the general coffee chats I'll probably turn down. But if they come to me with AI, you've got this particular knowledge or advice and that's what I'm after. Then I'll jump on a quick call with them and, and digging incredible. Well, again, thank you for your time, Jackson. Congratulations on acquiring PassMark software, reaching you all the best going forward. And maybe we'll get a chance to update this in the future, maybe in like a year or so and just kind of check in and see how it's going. No, absolutely. Maybe at some point when I'm in California with the business, we can, we'll be in the same place at the same time when you come to Australia, right? And we can come and cuddle a koala and we will. Yes. We'll get a thousand times. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Australia is right towards the top of my bucket list. And I shared this with you already, but I've got two little boys, a five year old and three year old, and they're obsessed with Bluey. So we have to be in Brisbane at some point so we can not only meet you, that's, that's what I get out of it, but then they can hang out at the Bluey, at the Bluey house and have

fun there too. Absolutely. Absolutely. I look forward to it. All right. Thanks, Jackson. Talk to you later. We'll do it. See ya.