Steve Hughes, now CEO at Quor Eka, is a something of a veteran when it comes to M&A with 25 M&A projects under his belt. For example, he ran Aspect, building that business and successfully selling it to ION. So, he knows a thing or two about financing of CTRM vendors and has experienced several different types of ownership in his career in the CTRM space. At Aspect, he started out backed by a private investor’s family office. There, this investor was able to help, not just with capital backing but also with great connections across the oil industry and around the world. Some of these also became investors or members of the advisory board, he told me. “Having a private owner is very different to having a PE investor,” he said. “The private investor likely has no short-term motivation to turn around and sell the business but is seeking longer-term growth and profitability.” Steve and the Aspect team went on to grow that business, establishing it as an early SaaS pioneer and expanding its footprint across, not just oil and gas, but also into ags, softs, and metals. “We were cloud and multi-tenanted. Our technology and architecture made us… continue reading