Case Study

Overview

• Idaho-based Bully Dog Technologies is an aftermarket automotive technology company providing full-featured automotive collaboration solutions primarily to the truck market.
• Founded in 1999, Bully Dog has been one of the most innovative companies in the automotive aftermarket space.  With 2-3 major new product releases each year, the company is consistently first to market with new technology breakthroughs.
• The company is a market leader due to its relentless focus on providing a high quality, high value service to its customers and managing a very low turnover workforce.

Situation

• The company was owned and actively managed by three founding brothers.
• It had captured the largest share of the U.S. market and was well positioned with the right products to begin a large-scale roll out to several attractive international markets.
• An emerging automotive industry focus on “the connected car” brought an opportunity for the company to leverage its experience with vehicle drive-train computer systems into many exciting new applications.

Cascadia Process

• Cascadia ran a sale process that included over 50 strategic and private equity investors.
• Cascadia brought an outside-the-box mindset to the mandate by understanding and appropriately presenting the connected car opportunity to maximize the company value.
• Cascadia worked with Global Environment Fund (“GEF”), a private equity investor with $1 billion AUM, to structure a 100% buyout of the company and long-term employment agreements for the three founders.
• GEF had just closed the acquisition of SCT, another industry player with significant complimentary, but non-overlapping technologies and customer segments.