Consolidating a Global Platform After Years of M&A

Buy & Build the hard way

The opportunity

A UK-headquartered EdTech group with over 100 years of heritage was moving from physical publishing to a unified, SaaS-first business that serves schools, teachers, students and parents worldwide. Backed by private equity and built through years of buy-and-build M&A, the group had grown to 22 brands and 25 products. The next phase of growth meant consolidating that portfolio into a single, scalable platform

Goals

Complete the shift to SaaS, sell more products per customer, expand into new markets, bundle and integrate the product set, and keep growing through M&A; all in support of a $100M EBITDA target.

The challenge

Fast, acquisitive growth had left the business fragmented rather than unified:

Multiple brands sitting in separate legal entities
Separate product organisations with limited integration between them
Different tech stacks and delivery teams, working in different ways
Data scattered across systems, formats and sources of truth
A limited pool of affordable senior tech talent

Our approach

Build a Value Creation Plan to accelerate software development, including a new Global Delivery Centre based in Bangalore
Run buy-side, pre-acquisition Tech DD covering architecture, product, engineering and post-acquisition integration
Install a new Global Architecture leadership to define the SaaS target architecture, roadmap and agile ways of working
Modernise core "back-office" capabilities; namely CRM, pricing & bundling, customer onboarding for a SaaS business model

Results

The implementation of the new supply chain management software led to significant improvements:

‍130+ engineers across 19 squads, working under a global delivery model spanning the UK, Australia, India and Central & Eastern Europe that balances cost and capability
A new Architecture function with company-wide governance, standards and playbooks‍
Centralisation & integration across the product set: single sign-on, API integration, domain-driven data models and shared services

‍

$14B

UK EdTech market size

22 Brands | 25 Products

Strong Buy & Build strategy driving vigorous M&A activity