When Keith Moran got a call from KPMG in Denmark this year to say a client had been watching the progress of his company SL Controls, he thought nothing of it. “I’d had emails like that before. I thought they were just touting for business.”
Moran founded SL Controls in 2002 alongside Shane Loughlin, his former lecturer in electrical engineering at IT Sligo, with the duo initially working from their respective kitchens.
They had spotted an opportunity in integrating and optimising high-speed manufacturing processes, particularly for regulated sectors such as pharma and medical devices, which need increasingly rigorous tracking at every stage.
Within two years, as demand grew from multinational clients, they were employing 15 people. “Shane focused on the technology and I’d take care of the systems and processes, the pillars for the business,” Moran says.
He was thinking big, filling key positions in areas such as human resources before the business really required it. “It was really important to me to look after our staff — it’s something I’m very passionate about,” Moran says. He believes that having a strong HR practice from the start was “instrumental” in its subsequent growth. Today it employs 90 people and plans to take on 50 more.
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In 2007 the company moved into purpose-built premises in Collooney, Co Sligo, and new offices in Galway, Limerick and Dublin followed. Younger service engineers are often happy to be on the road, but once they settle down they prefer not to be, he says. Having local teams helped the business to retain key talent.
By 2015 SL Controls was undertaking a growing number of projects in the UK from Ireland. The Brexit referendum prompted the founders to look elsewhere for growth. Working with so many US multinationals based in Ireland made America an obvious choice. In 2019 they opened an office in Florida.
The following year Moran brought in a non-executive director, Pat McGrath, formerly of the construction engineering specialists PM Group, who helped with the development of a three-year strategic plan designed to take the business to 2023.
Everything was going according to plan, with the business on track to meet target revenues in excess of €10 million this year. Then KPMG Denmark called on behalf of a client, the Danish IT firm NNIT, which has more than 3,000 employees worldwide. In retrospect, the timing was perfect.
“We didn’t go looking to be acquired but we were like a sandwich company in that we were too small to be big, and too big to be small. Increasingly we’d be providing customers with ‘first to market’ technical innovations, and they would then request that we roll it out worldwide. But we weren’t big enough to do that,” he says. It meant they lost jobs. “We knew it would continue to be an issue. In a way, we’d be victims of our own success.”
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The most obvious option was to grow by acquisition, but that would have entailed taking on investors, which he had not previously done. A meeting with NNIT followed. “Their culture fit with our ours — it just felt right. I met the board and really liked them,” he says.
The deal closed on July 5, and the company was sold at an enterprise value of €16.9 million, comprising an upfront payment of €12.7 million and an earnout element of €4.2 million.
All SL Controls staff and management will remain in place. The “hardest part” was not being able to talk about the deal to staff, he says, because of the non-disclosure agreement. “I didn’t like that but it was for the future of the company.”
It was not an easy decision, personally. “I had set up the company to be master of my own destiny but I’d brought it to a point and so felt, let’s not put it in danger. It felt right.”
Moran, 43, is happy now. “We’re talking about opportunities, about collaborations. It feels exciting. And that strain of being small and not having enough people is gone. We can push on now.”
