To prepare her family business for a transaction, Birko Corp. Owner Kelly Green says she recognized that she needed to hire an outside CEO. That became Mark Swanson.
Together, Swanson and Green set out to determine who would be a good partner and what that would look like. Once she found the right one — PE firm Class VI Partners — she says she worked with them for many years, meeting monthly to discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly. From those meetings, difficult conversations were had around what needed to be fixed and what it was going to take. Together, they created a blueprint that identified Birko‘s weaknesses and strengths, and build a model to grow and increase value.
Swanson, speaking at the 2023 Denver Smart Business Dealmakers Conference, says he met Green at graduate school. Back then, she had many stories she shared with the class about the issues with the company. By the time Green asked Swanson to help with the company as its CEO, he says the business had several years of declining revenue and margin decline.
“We had started seeing some pretty serious competition that Birko had not experienced before,” Swanson says. “We had an average age of our salesforce of 65 years old, and we were essentially sales and marketing organization. And the company had been on just a slow decline for many, many years. On the upside, we had just a wonderful product line that was really well known, a huge amount of brand equity in our marketplace and a culture that was something we could really build on. So, from a pretty rocky start, we had a really solid base, that we knew we could probably grow the company and then be wildly successful, which we were.”
In December 2021, after Swanson worked on the business for 15 years, they ultimately sold the company to Diversey Holdings. Swanson says while there were a lot of difficult times, they ended up wildly successful in their transaction. But when they sat back and thought about what they would have done differently, he says the easy answer is they would probably execute quicker on some of the things they had to go through — perhaps capitalized sooner, brought Class VI in earlier, brought a legal firm in sooner, etc.
“It's easy to say we should have done all of that sooner,” Swanson says. “And it's a little bit cliché, but I think I'll flip it around and say, we probably did really, really well. We recognized that we needed to do all that. And we could have done it faster.”
While he says early on in that process he would have defined success through financial measures, but the company’s internal discussions around what would constitute success was building a great company.
“All my direct reports, and the entire management team, and our strategic plan was wrapped around, how do we build a great company?” he says. “And I think the financial outcome proves that we built a great company.”
