Acquisitions & Integration

In early 2023 our company had no presence in fresh fish. The CEO of our seafood group (AZ Gems) and my boss had already struck a deal in principle to acquire a 50% stake in a Brazilian farming and processing company. I came in to execute.

The diligence was harder than I expected. The target was a spinoff of a parent company in twelve-year bankruptcy proceedings, and the court had not yet authorized a sale. Brazilian law also restricted foreign ownership of certain rural land to less than 50%, which conflicted with the controlling stake we needed. I advised against the deal. The cost basis was high and the constraints were real. I was instructed to proceed.

I assembled a legal team in Brazil and structured the deal as a land-holding company at less than 50% foreign ownership, paired with an operating company at 50% with a controlling board structure. The land-holding company had to defer to the operating company on most decisions. Court approval to sell the assets out of bankruptcy took eight months.

By the end we had locked in 24,000 metric tons of annual supply at a $16M total deal value, with the farms and processing plants renovated. We pivoted from frozen to fresh, and by the time I stepped away in late 2025 the supply line was operating into HEB and Walmart.

We were spending more than $4M a year on cold storage in Los Angeles. In 2025 a regional cold storage business came up for sale: two long-term warehouse leases, a clean book, and three owner-operators running it well. None of us had run a cold storage business before.

I built ten-year profitability models against our inventory costs and brought the case to the CFO and senior management. The acquisition could supply our own storage at a much lower internal rate while keeping the third-party business running.

Two conditions had to hold for the deal to work. The leases had to be renegotiated for the next ten years at acceptable rates, and the three owner-operators had to stay on. I drew up employment contracts that retained them as employees and made an offer for the business. They accepted. The lease renegotiation landed at a rate that protected the underlying profitability with room for error.

The acquisition closed in October 2025 at $2M, generating $6M in new ARR and $1.8M in annual savings on our own storage. Integration was underway when I stepped away later that year.

A Boston-based trading firm came up for sale. The acquisition would give us access to a $15M ARR product category we did not previously sell into, primarily lobster, with established customer relationships available at low cost.

I led the financial diligence: modeling the deal with accounting, interviewing the CFO, reviewing the books, and calculating asset value. I worked with our legal team on the contract structure. We closed the transaction at $1.2M.

The deal was struck before I came in. A wild-shrimp processor in Biloxi was running short of operating capital and could not fulfill its contracts with a major food service distributor. We took over the customer relationships, put up the operating capital and inventory costs, and let the processor continue fulfilling. No equity changed hands.

My job was the integration. Wild shrimp does not arrive on a steady schedule. Some days there’s a metric ton and some days there is nothing. We stockpiled during the in-seasons and managed inventory through the year. We received several purchase orders a week and shipped daily.

I built and oversaw the synchronization between the two teams. Their technical team and ours worked on a shared inventory tracking system with a clear flow of information. Order fulfillment ran end to end across both companies: orders into our team, transferred to theirs, fulfillment tracked at their end, payments received at ours. A weekly meeting kept both sides synchronized.

By the time I handed operations to our standing team, we had done close to $14M in revenue at a margin above 10%, which is strong for wild shrimp.

By 2014 I was ready to step away from i‑Script to go back to school. I negotiated the sale and led the post-acquisition integration into the acquirer.

The diligence material to assemble was substantial: customer relationships, two products in production, and operational processes the acquirer needed to absorb. The integration itself ran several months after close, with the acquirer’s team running operations alongside ours until they could carry the business forward on their own.

By the time I left for my MBA, the handover was complete.