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Hill Dickinson advises new buy-and-build venture on first acquisition in ambitious M&A pipeline

Hill Dickinson advises new buy-build venture on first acquisition in ambitious M&A pipeline

Commercial law firm Hill Dickinson has advised a newly formed buy-and-build venture on the acquisition of cloud-service provider, RISC IT Solutions.

The new venture, an IT/managed services platform with a buy-and-build strategy, is being led by two individuals, Alex Heslip and Chris Earle, who were formerly group sales director and chief executive of aggregated business service provider, Verastar. 

Drawing on their experience of scaling Verastar from £16 million EBITDA to £40 million EBITDA in under 10 years then delivering an exit via a secondary buy-out at a valuation in excess of £430 million, they have now teamed up with hybrid investor-adviser Independence Capital to construct a group with a best-in-class management structure.

The acquisition of Llandudno-based RISC IT forms the bedrock of the new group, with a pipeline of further M&A deals already built and due to be announced in due course. RISC IT has a 23-year history in providing Microsoft Office 365, backup/restore and Azure cloud migrations, and has recently added a full Managed Service Provider (MSP) offering focusing on the 25-100 user market. 

Corporate partner Jon Gillow led on the provision of legal advice to the purchaser, assisted by Joel Bailey (corporate) and Al Mackinnon and Zaigham Jaffri (banking).

He said: “The opportunity for Alex and Chris to create a new buy-and-build group for IT and managed services is the start of an exciting venture with huge promise and we were pleased to have provided legal advice on the group’s first acquisition.  We look forward to working with them on more transactions over the course of the coming months.” 

Under the new structure, Alex Heslip takes on the role of chief executive, while Chris Earle becomes non-exec chairman of the group.
 

Key contacts

Jonathan Gillow

Partner
Manchester
Contact
Jonathan Gillow | Hill Dickinson

Joel Bailey

Associate
Manchester
Contact
Joel Bailey | Hill Dickinson

Alasdair Mackinnon

Partner
Manchester
Contact
Alasdair Mackinnon | Hill Dickinson

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