Management of BTC has realized a management buy-out together with Pride Capital Partners
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Ray Kemp (CEO) and Frank Meerts (CFO) have realized a management buy-out (“MBO”) of BTC together with management and Pride Capital Partners. The founders of BTC, Dick Houtsma and Ronald Horn, remain involved in the company as a minority shareholder and will join the Advisory Board in 2020.
Since the inception in 2000 BTC has built a strong position in the telecom and IT market. In the past year Dick Houtsma and Ronald Horn have decided to gradually step down from daily operations. In January 2019 they appointed Ray Kemp as new CEO of BTC. A couple of months later Frank Meerts joined as CFO.
Both Ray Kemp and Frank Meerts have gained strong experience at several companies in the IT market and use this experience to realize further roll-out of the BTC strategy together with management. This strategy is centered around merging telecom and IT. The focus is on strengthening the product portfolio; connectivity/cloud, Managed Services and System Integration. With this they will realize a unique combination as Managed Service Provider and as a result will be able to serve customers with more high-quality solutions. To support this strategy BTC is actively looking for strategic add-on acquisitions.
Dick Houtsma and Ronald Horn: “In almost 20 years we have built BTC with great passion to a leading company in the IT market. The time has come to give Ray Kemp and Frank Meerts the opportunity to execute the growth strategy of BTC.”
Ray and Frank about the recent developments: “Dick and Ronald have established a beautiful company over the past 19 years. We are confident that, with this solid basis, we can execute the intended buy and build strategy and realize the growth ambitions that they have started a year ago.”
Lars van ‘t Hoenderdaal (Managing Partner Pride Capital Partners): “Since March 2018 we are financier of BTC. Ray Kemp is well known within the Pride Capital Partners network as he was earlier involved with IT company Lunatech, where Pride Capital Partners co-financed an MBO transaction. We welcome Ray Kemp and Frank Meerts into the management team of BTC and are happy to make this transaction possible.”
BTC advises and supports companies and governments with strategic IT solutions. The mission of BTC is to be the ‘creative and technical party’ for IT challenges of its customers. Together with over 70 employees BTC provides, in cooperation with the customer, effective and achievable solutions that have a fit with the DNA of the customer and takes care of the implementation of these solutions. This leads to an increase in customer loyalty and effectiveness of company processes, and as a result the customer is ‘Ready for the Cloud’ and ready for the future.
Pride Capital Partners is a specialized private debt company, which finances profitable and growing companies in the software and ICT market for growth, acquisitions and buy-out transactions.
The funding of Pride Capital Partners comes from its own shareholders, wealthy individuals, family offices, (former) entrepreneurs and institutional investors. The portfolio consists of amongst others OnGuard, DataManagement Professionals, The Valley, Spotzer, BTC, Bright River and German companies KAIROS, COYO and Link11.
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