International Corner

The episode offers a useful three-option M&A framework and some operational specifics (two-week product-team onboarding, pricing boundary decisions, board-only reporting change), but roughly a third of the runtime is consumed by the icebreaker, country-by-country origin stories, and the host summarising what the guest just said. The insight rate is moderate rather than dense.

“there's actually three options. You can buy competing products and try to enter new markets...you can acquire, you know, CRM companies, so companies offering CRM systems, but tailored to other ICPs...Option number three is to buy products which complements the CRM system”

“we've sticked with their pricing. What we've said is that we want...to sell...only the basic solutions...And if our customers want more...well then they need to go directly and buy it from the event management company”

The reframe of M&A as ecosystem-building rather than geographic entry is a genuinely fresh angle for a mid-market European SaaS, and the argument that buying a competing CRM in another region becomes 'a pure financial play' is a non-obvious counter to the standard consolidation playbook. Most other content, however, falls back on standard M&A wisdom: cultural fit matters, be clear on your goals, learn to say no.

“we could buy a company in North America, but that becomes a pure financial play, right? We don't have that much value to give to them. They don't have that much value to give to us. So then it's just going to be like a portfolio of many different CRM companies”

“it's like going into a candy store, right? If you go into a candy store, it's very hard to go out and not buy candy”

Erlend Mohus is a genuine operator - Chief Strategy and Acquisition Officer at an 80M-EUR-revenue European SaaS - who has personally run the deals he describes, including a post-acquisition tragedy that tests integration theory against reality. He is not a career podcaster or thought-leader; he is a practitioner at the right scale for B2B operators in the mid-market, though not a serial acquirer at a notable scale that would push the score higher.

“290, uh, employees and have roughly, um, 80 million euros in revenues”

“we acquired, in 2000 we acquired a, ah, CRM system in Switzerland, we acquired a CRM system in Sweden”

The episode delivers several concrete data points - deal size, headcount, revenue split by region, a named acquiree (Litte), a two-week onboarding timeline, Rule of 40 as a screening criterion - which lift it above vague hand-waving. However, no acquisition prices, no cross-sell conversion rates, and no comparative growth figures are provided, leaving the most commercially useful numbers absent.

“the average is roughly 15 to 20 seats, which gives an average deal size in euros of uh, roughly 20,000 Euros”

“the Nordics, which is roughly 70% of our revenues. Between 60 and 70%”

The host asks a few genuinely useful follow-ups - pushing on why competing products are excluded, probing the cultural-fit threshold, and walking through the post-acquisition timeline step by step - but too often resorts to paraphrasing the guest's last answer back to them rather than pressing for numbers or challenging claims. The icebreaker segment and closing pleasantries consume several minutes of a 50-minute show.

“So can I ask why? Why not buying competing products?”

“That's a point that I wanted to ask you how strong the cultural fit is of a criteria within the decision on making the acquisition. For instance, let's say if everything looks great on the paper, but you guys have doubt on cultural fit between both companies, do you still acquire or do you or do you not?”