Bullhorn Loads Up the Cyber Monday Shopping Cart to Acquire Sendouts and MaxHire
While most of the world spent Cyber Monday stuffing TVs, clothes, and toys into over-flowing online shopping carts, Bullhorn loaded up its corporate card buying two fantastic companies: Sendouts and MaxHire Solutions.
Customers First
MaxHire and Sendouts are great acquisitions for Bullhorn for the simple fact that we are dramatically expanding our roster of talented engineering, services and sales professionals. Bullhorn’s client base in North America has been growing rapidly for years. It’s always been a challenge to find smart, customer-oriented sales and services professionals who understand the recruiting industry. These two companies bring Bullhorn an army of highly skilled and highly trained talent that hits the ground running to serve our 160,000 combined users. We now have full geographic coverage of all of North America. And because both MaxHire and Sendouts have a track record of delivering fantastic customer service, they’re bringing some very innovative approaches to customer support we’ll be adopting early next year. It’s a great day for entire combined Bullhorn, MaxHire, and Sendouts customer base.
Nerds Second
While the war for engineering talent rages, software companies around the world are fighting to lure developers away from each other – offering signing bonuses, iPads, and other enticements. However, Bullhorn just doubled its software engineering team in a single day. I spent a lot of time this summer with Peter Blitz, CEO of MaxHire, and Brian Hopcraft, CEO of Sendouts. During our many lengthy discussions, we all kept coming back to a common theme. Each of the three companies were sinking the entirety of its R&D efforts in building software applications that would work on any device, any browser, and in any language. The resurgence of the Mac and the wild proliferation of mobile devices had called all three of us to the same rallying cry. It made perfect sense for us to pool our engineering resources to dramatically accelerate our time-to-market.
The Truth about Private Equity
One of the biggest reasons that we partnered with Vista Equity back in June was to fuel our next stage of growth, which included an aggressive acquisition strategy. While the public markets would have provided us with the available capital, Vista gave us the enormous benefit of their depth and breadth of software M&A expertise, as well as the ability to remain a private company. That was important to me, because today’s announcement isn’t about impressing investors for one or two quarters. Today’s move expands our product and services portfolio in a way that will sustain years of exponential growth in the staffing industry. An IPO is certainly on the horizon for Bullhorn. But for now, rather than spending the day with investors and analysts, I’ll be quite happy spend the day with our employees and customers.
