Nick Keegan·October 6, 2025

Acquisition Unlock: €210m in 5 Years | Nick Keegan Interview

Nick Keegan co-founded Mail Metrics in Ireland in 2013 as a digital billing consolidation app, spent three years nearly running out of money, then pivoted when an insurance company asked him to take over their transactional print and mail operations. By 2020 the business had grown organically to €2m revenue and €200k EBITDA, but Nick identified a structural flaw: the company was routing all print work through a third-party partner and capturing only digital revenue. Starting in 2019 he educated himself on M&A, hired a Deloitte corporate finance executive as CFO (offering equity in lieu of full salary), and in 2021 acquired two transactional printing businesses—one Irish, one UK—for €4.7m in high-cost alternative debt, jumping revenue from €2m to €14.4m in a single year. The core strategy is a four-pillar roll-up: acquire legacy transactional print businesses at sub-5x EBITDA, onboard them to Mail Metrics’ proprietary communications platform, shift pricing from transactional to SaaS, and convert customers from print to digital—capturing the valuation arbitrage between print and software multiples. By end of 2024, after a transformational acquisition of a €180m-revenue UK business (closed day before Christmas Eve 2024 via a ‘double deal’ combining PE equity and a club of bank lenders), Mail Metrics reached €210m in revenue, €27m EBITDA, and ~640 employees across Ireland, UK, and Poland, with Nick eyeing a US entry and a path to €1bn in revenue.

Deal facts

multiple: less than 5x EBITDA (each acquisition)
sde ebitda: EBITDA €27m at close of 2024 (combined); €2.6m post-2021 acquisitions; €5.4m post-2023 acquisition
revenue: €210m combined revenue by end of 2024
financing structure: 2021: €4.7m alternative/venture debt (~20% all-in rate), no personal guarantee; refinanced to ~3% bank debt within 12 months. 2023 acquisition: fully bank-funded. 2024 acquisition: club of two Irish banks + PE equity raise (double deal structure)
notes: First two acquisitions (July & August 2021): one Irish printing company, one UK printing company, both former print partners. Third acquisition August 2023: ~€13m revenue UK/Ireland business. Fourth acquisition (largest): ~€180m revenue, ~€22m EBITDA UK business, closed day before Christmas Eve 2024. All acquisitions bought for less than 5x EBITDA.

Why this business

Nick and his co-founders originally built a digital customer communications platform (Mail Metrics) and had been routing print work through a third-party printing partner while keeping only the digital revenue. He realized they were giving away the lion’s share of contract value to that partner, and that acquiring print businesses would both capture the full economics and give them a ready customer base to cross-sell their digital platform. The strategy was to buy legacy transactional print businesses cheaply (sub-5x EBITDA), convert their customers to digital communications, and capture the valuation arbitrage between a print multiple and a software/SaaS multiple.

What's working

Buying transactional print businesses at sub-5x EBITDA and converting customers to digital communications, effectively re-rating the EBITDA multiple toward software/SaaS valuations (estimated ~10x)
Proprietary technology platform built over 10 years that competitors cannot replicate; rivals typically resell third-party software
Fully managed service model: Mail Metrics delivers the software as a managed service, allowing clients to save on postage (the largest cost) while Mail Metrics retains better margins on the digital side
Cross-selling digital platform to print customers acquired through M&A, providing instant customer base for the tech product
Hiring a corporate finance CFO (Shane from Deloitte) with a personal equity stake, which unlocked banking relationships and deal-structuring expertise
Using alternative/venture debt for the first acquisitions when traditional banks refused, then refinancing to low-rate bank debt once the combined business had credibility
Enterprise Ireland key manager grant covering 50% of CFO salary in year one, reducing the cost of the strategic hire
Persistent follow-up on acquisition targets (monthly emails over many months) that ultimately re-opened the largest deal after it fell out of exclusivity

What's hard

First seven years of the business (2013–2019) generated very little revenue; company nearly ran out of cash multiple times before finding product-market fit
Original app idea was fundamentally flawed: solved a consumer pain point but no party would pay for it; wasted ~€700k in seed funding and three years before pivoting
Customer acquisition is extremely slow due to the conservative, regulated nature of banks and insurance companies
First two acquisitions involved integrating businesses in two countries simultaneously with no prior M&A experience
Buying businesses considerably larger than themselves required high-cost alternative debt (all-in ~20%) because mainstream banks refused
2024 ‘double deal’ — simultaneously conducting due diligence on acquisition target while being diligenced by PE investors — was described as nearly fatal in terms of complexity and stress
Had to shut down an entire Dublin facility and relocate ~50 staff across the city as part of 2023 integration
Founders paid themselves very little (~€30k/year) for many years while building the business

Notable quotes

Within 6 to 12 months we would have been out of business like and you know you often hear those stories and say like oh you know that makes for a good story but it's the truth. We were we had no customers and we were we had we'd raised 700 grand like two and a half years or you know two years prior.

I said to him, why don't you just leave Deloitte and come and join us as CFO and help me pull all this together.

We are buying these outsourced transactional printing businesses. Pillar two is we onboard them onto our digital platform. Stage three is we try to move them away from transactional pricing to more SaaS based pricing. And then pillar four is digitization where we tried to send more digital communications than print effectively.

It sounds like an infinite money glitch, but it's not, right? It's easier said than done. But if executed on, yes, that's exactly it. Like if I could wave a magic wand and if I could take a business that we've bought for 5x EBITDA or less and convert 100% to digital, which will never happen, the valuation would probably be worth even more than 10.