Peter Blitz built his MaxHire recruiting software company from a startup in 2000 into a business generating just under $10 million in annual revenue last year.
Then, in 2012, after the company had just moved into newly renovated headquarters in Gastown, MaxHire unexpectedly received an acquisition offer from Boston-based Bullhorn.
“We were not shopping the company,” said Blitz. “We were not building [it] for that purpose at all.”
Blitz is happy with the deal and considers his company lucky, describing the offer as the “perfect offer [from the] perfect buyer.”
But in hindsight, he wished he had taken advice given by a fellow CEO several years ago a little more seriously.
“[He said] always make sure that your company looks good from the outside as well as the inside, because you never know what’s going to happen. I never looked at things that way … I wish I’d taken his advice better, because I could have been in a better position when this offer came along.”
For example, Blitz said spending money on the new office renovations may have been the wrong move. While the sleek new headquarters attracted top talent, Blitz now thinks the company would have been better off negotiating a way to do the work without dipping into the company’s cash.
“If we had worked those expenses as capital investments into, for example, the lease agreement with the landlord, and financed it so that we had more cash in the bank,” said Blitz, “we [would have] looked more healthy from the outside.”
Blitz, who said his strength is product development, also thinks the company should have hired a CFO to guide the strategic growth of the company much sooner.
“We should have had a good CFO when we hit $3 million to $5 million in revenue, and we were at almost $10 million and still didn’t have one.”
