It appears guesstimates of The Monkeys’ price tag to Accenture – widely rumoured around the $20-$30 million mark – were way off, with revelations today the consultancy firm paid a staggering $63 million for Australia’s largest independent agency.
The Australian Financial Review has this morning reported the huge sum after it managed to procure documents filed with securities regulator the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
What makes the $63 million booty so massive is the relatively small turnover and profit by The Monkeys in comparison.
As had been widely reported previously, The Monkeys, with 130 full time staff, made $21.6 million in revenue in the financial year to June 2016 and only $2.45 million of that was profit.
Based on that figure, the deal with Accenture was clearly based on three times the annual revenue turnover.
The AFR has reported that, “The purchase price will be divided in the typical fashion between an upfront payment and an earnout period. The key performance indicators, or key metrics, used to determine the success of the deal, and the earnout, are mostly based around staff retention.”
What is not clear is The Monkeys’ founders continuing role in the business. Scott Nowell, Mark Green and Justin Drape have all publicly stated they will stay with the business, but for how long is anyone’s guess. With such a windfall under their belts a new venture should surely be in the offing?
Back in May, when the Accenture deal was struck, The Monkeys’ CEO, Mark Green, said it “would be business as usual”and the sale was “the natural evolution in the agency’s life”.
Green also revealed there had been other offers on the table, which can now be revealed as having come from PwC.
At the time Green told B&T: “After almost 11 years we were looking at different ways to keep growing and learning new things and this presented a really good opportunity to do just that.
“The whole industry is undergoing so much change because that’s because what clients want is changing so rapidly. So, from that standpoint, it didn’t feel odd to us.”
Alongside Green, Drape and Nowell, the other owners of The Monkeys include executive planner Fabio Buresti, David Park, the owner of design agency Maud which was part of the Accenture deal, Nicholas Jackson, a managing partner at Maud, and Matthew Michael, a managing director at The Monkeys.
