Introduction
In this revealing interview, Jesper Søgaard, co-founder and CEO of Better Collective, shares his business acquisition strategy that transformed a small startup into a $700 million holding company. Starting in 2004 with just an idea during a gap year, Jesper and his co-founder Christian Graversen have built an impressive portfolio through 35 strategic acquisitions, creating one of the most successful digital sports media and betting companies with over 1,200 employees across 20 international offices.
Founder Success Story QnA
Where did it all start? What were you doing before founding Better Collective?
Actually, 2004 was the incorporation of the company, but my co-founder Christian Graversen and I, we actually had a gap year after high school in 2002, and that’s where the small seed for the company was planted basically based on the affiliate business model within online casino and sharing sort of bonus tips and strategies. At the time, we had ourselves learned how you could actually wager and be smart about the Blackjack strategy and optimize your winnings that way and go to the next Collective bonus and so forth. So a way where it was explained how you could actually outsmart the casino. It’s not possible anymore, but there was that short loophole at the time which got us into the industry.
How would you sum up the first five years? At what moment did you realize this could be a very large business?
It was the latter. We started and we moved to Copenhagen, started studying. I have a master’s degree in political science, so while we were studying, we were working with our first small websites. It was very much the slow version. Revenues were very limited in the beginning, and had we been a venture-backed company, I’m not sure we would have made it because the first three years we didn’t see much development in the performance of the company. But what did change the business was when we finished with our Bachelor Degree, which is roughly three years after the incorporation, we took a year with dedicated focus on the company rather than the studies, and that’s where we lifted the audience performance and revenue performance, so it could suddenly pay two full-time salaries with a surplus. That was the point in 2006 where we considered okay, we’re on to something here. It really has that scalable potential, and we have no cost, it’s just the two of us and Christian’s little brother helping out a bit as well.
Was it a very hard journey, or were you just in your 20s having fun while working long hours?
It was the fun and us not knowing what we were doing really, but just living that free life you have in your 20s where you don’t consider it work. When I look back, I can see a lot of stuff that today would be work because it takes time away from my family, but back then when it was just me, I did not consider it work. My feeling was no, it wasn’t that crazy grind, and we didn’t have to give up a lot. It wasn’t a horrible tough experience. It was more just what we liked doing. We basically filled our life with something that was also related to the company, but we didn’t necessarily consider it work.
How was the partnership in the early days? What were your strengths and weaknesses versus Christian’s?
We have a very clear personal profile. We’re basically mirror images of each other, complete opposites, but when you fold them together, they fit. What has been very fortunate for us is that we have a shared set of values. We’re both fairly calm and not in need of it having to be my way. From a personality and skill set perspective, we’re very different. Christian is much more the detail-oriented guy who knows the ins and outs of everything we do, and can basically jump into each part and have a very qualified view on many details. I’m more the opposite, the big picture kind of guy and the stakeholder person. I consider how we position Better Collective in an ecosystem, how we engage with stakeholders, and what we need to consider for taking the next step in the company’s development.
When did you decide to expand quicker by acquiring competitors or entering new markets?
From 2009 up until 2017, it was pure organic growth. We were developing these Sports Betting media brands and communities for different European markets. Starting in 2014, some of our competitors started to buy businesses in our space. In the beginning, we thought, does that make sense? We’ll keep focusing on what we do and grow organically. But then we realized they’re getting quite big, and can we stay competitive if we don’t reach a similar scale? In 2015, we formulated a proper strategy called ‘Accomplish 2019’ that set directions for the business. One path was professionalization, and secondly setting ambitious targets. We wanted to be in a position by 2019 where we could potentially list the company. When we saw competitors buying businesses, we gradually realized that if we could acquire some of the great local brands, they would add to our platform. The realization came in 2016, and we did our first acquisition in 2017.
How has your revenue streams changed over time?
It has changed quite a bit. We started out in the affiliate space, so we’re paid predominantly by sportsbooks for delivering customers on a performance-based model. That was 100% of our revenue back in the day, and 100% from Europe. At the IPO, we had a single biggest customer accounting for 50% of our revenue. Since then, we’ve added general advertising sales, subscription business, and sponsorship business. Now, the performance-based business is still very big, around 75% of our business, with the remainder in different business areas. From a geographical perspective, we’ve developed North America and South America, so Europe is now below 50% of our business, and customer concentration has gone down significantly to around 25%.
Do you wish you had started the acquisition strategy earlier?
Yes, I think that’s the short answer. That has been the discussion I’ve had with Christian sometimes because we realized that prices were even lower in some years prior to us starting. There’s the balance of whether the size we had would allow us to finance acquisitions back then. It’s not that I sit today thinking it would have made a huge difference had we started two or three years earlier, but I think it would have made sense. Whether it would have been a really needle mover, I don’t know, but yes, we immediately saw success, and the trend was that businesses were even cheaper in the earlier years.
What was your strategy when looking for the first acquisitions? Did you go for smaller players or larger ones?
When we started out, we had a lot to learn. We didn’t think about buying a platform like I would today. We thought, is this a good brand for this market? Can we buy it at an attractive price? That’s interesting, we’ll do that. Obviously, there was a difference in the size of the acquisitions, and we fairly quickly learned that there have to be very good reasons for buying something small because it would require a lot of work and you’re not getting such big rewards. There can be strategic unlocks by doing a small one, but from the learnings, small versus big, I would go for big. That’s the rule of thumb.
How has the post-acquisition integration worked? Do sellers stay on or do you take over completely?
We’ve had almost all different models. We’ve had businesses where we acquired it with a short handover period of 3 to 6 months, and then we own it, control it, and quickly integrated it to our own ways of working. Then we’ve had businesses where we moved into a new business area, like when we acquired HLTV, which is the biggest brand within community and news in CS2. There we retained the founders because it was clearly a different kind of business, and we wanted to make sure this well-performing business continued. We created an earn-out, they got shares in Better Collective, and a three-year earn-out to ensure they would work with it and develop it. It has turned out that now Martin and Nikolaj are out of the earn-out and are part of Better Collective with the same responsibilities.
With 35 acquisitions, have things always gone as planned?
Obviously, there have been acquisitions that did not go as we planned and hoped. Back to the lesson of small versus big, the problem with smaller ones is you end up not giving them enough attention and care. That’s a good reason for buying big because you’re more focused on making that perform. We’ve experienced with a bigger acquisition where we realized we had not bought as solid a business as we thought, so we learned a lot on the due diligence side. When I consider the net of all acquisitions, it has created a lot of value for Better Collective and from an expansion and positioning perspective. We were just here, and now we have a very strong platform for growth in North America and South America because of the acquisitions we’ve done.
What are you typically after when acquiring a business? Is it traffic, people, or revenue?
It will vary. We’ve bought some businesses based on the affiliate business model, similar to where we came from. They’ve been fairly obvious financial acquisitions where we could buy them at an attractive price and realize synergies. We could improve audience growth by helping with search engine optimization, lift the immediate revenue performance, and it’s a fairly stable asset where the payback period is short. Then we have something like HLTV where we moved into a new category being esports, which unlocked a new business opportunity for the company with a different revenue model that was 100% ads-based. So quite different rationales for the different acquisitions.
How have your and Christian’s roles changed over time with all this growth?
I think it’s probably equivalent to getting a new job every second or third year. Going back, there was the change from just being guys in a flat trying to set up a website to employing people and having a small organization of 10 people to lead. Then when you get to 50 or 60 employees, you need to create a new layer of management, which changes the role to leading leaders. Then we start buying businesses, which is quite a new development. Then the IPO, and I could keep mentioning these things where it’s a pretty radical change. For me, that has catered well to my personality as I wouldn’t function well in the same job with no development. For Christian, being focused on operations and details, he had to develop the skill of letting others drive things forward with less hands-on approach.
What’s your thought process behind whether to build internally, partner, or acquire?
For us, our businesses are in the digital sports media space, that’s where we start. Then we consider how big an impact we can make with our business. Is it a pure sports business, a pure digital sports media? Then we can make a big difference and are a relevant owner. If it’s something more like traditional media that has some sports but also politics and other stuff, the part we’ll be affecting is much smaller, so that’s not relevant from an owner context. Another part is we care a lot about brands. We want to find proper brands with behavioral metrics that indicate whether a website is a true brand. You have a handful of apps or websites you go to every day without thinking, you just open your phone and go there. Such brands are what we ideally want to own with a passionate audience that goes there without thinking. That’s a very powerful position to have.
How do you approach capital allocation within Better Collective?
We have the luxury of a strong free cash flow, this year 55 to 75 million EUR. It comes with responsibility to use that cash flow in the most value-creating way for shareholders. When we do M&A, we need to consider our options of buying, looking at price levels, valuations in the landscape, how the public market is pricing things, and how Better Collective is priced. We consider what is the most attractive and value-creating for shareholders to buy. That’s coupled with focus on internal projects, considering how attractive they are compared to other options. Historically, we’ve tapped the market to raise new capital, had share buyback programs, and used bought back shares to buy businesses. We have flexibility in capital allocation, and it’s our responsibility to use that in a value-creating way.
What are your criteria for reinvesting profits versus distributing to shareholders?
We’ve been very clear about the M&A strategy and had so much opportunity with acquiring businesses and moving to new markets. It’s a more recent thing to consider other options. We look at expected rate of return for different projects, not just buying businesses. Right now, we’ve seen a significant share price decline in Better Collective, which ups the bar of other ways to allocate cash flow than not buying shares in Better Collective. It changes over time, but right now we’re in a phase where we really need to consider how to create the most value for shareholders with the prices we see in the market coupled with the price of Better Collective.
What’s your thought process behind staying in one industry versus following trends?
Christian and I agree on fundamentals like thinking long-term and believing in compounding. I listen a lot to the Acquired podcast, and they had an episode on one of the big US venture capital firms that was an investor in Apple from the early days. A big takeaway was they sold way too early. When was the biggest value lift in Apple? It was from 20 to 30 years or potentially 30 to 40 years, the compounding effect. We’re fairly aligned that we’re in an attractive industry, and if we keep building in this industry, we’ll see that strong effect in the outer years. At the same time, I’m curious by nature, so we’ve gotten involved in other stuff outside Better Collective. We have a family office together where we drive initiatives, so that curiosity is taken care of in a different vehicle, allowing us to stay focused in Better Collective on the industry we’re in.
What keeps you up at night?
We’re in an industry where a quarter in Better Collective is probably comparable to a year in a more traditional production company. There’s a lot of speed, and from an organizational perspective, in the last six months, we’ve had a big focus on development. That’s what’s been on my mind more recently. You always need to develop, but it requires the courage to make decisions and changes where you believe it’s for the greater good of the company and setting it up for success long-term.
How do you manage ego and humility leading such a large company?
I actually haven’t thought about it like that, and I think the same goes for Christian. We’ve always been very much about the next milestone. We got to this point, well, that allows us to get to the next level. We’re not complacent, we aspire to do more. I’m also realistic and honest that it’s not because of me that we’ve succeeded. It’s because of all the great people in the company and many factors around us. I’m just one small variable in that big equation. I don’t underestimate luck and timing. I can pinpoint times where had things not gone the way they did, I’m not certain we would have made it here. I’m respectful and mindful that there were times where we were lucky, and it depends on the skill sets of so many people in the company. With that mindset, it’s not that difficult to stay grounded because you acknowledge this is so much more than you.
What is your favorite book?
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s such a tacky title, I’m a bit not too proud to say that, but the book is great. It was more or less the first book written on human relations and is almost 100 years old. If you really manage to incorporate the thinking and mindset of that book, it will give you a lot of tailwind in your interactions with people. I read it at the right time, I think I was around 22, and it gave me the idea of always remembering to take another person’s perspective, not trying to force your opinion or objective on the other party, being respectful and mindful of putting yourself in their shoes. That goes a long way.
What’s the best investment advice you’ve ever received?
Think long-term and be decent. It sounds easy, and I think when I got that point and realized you have to be respectful and decent in your interactions, I underestimated the effect of that in long-term company building.
Jesper Søgaard Business Stats
Jesper Søgaard has successfully built Better Collective into a powerhouse in the digital sports media industry. With an impressive growth trajectory, the company now generates significant revenue through multiple streams while maintaining strong profitability. The table below highlights key financial metrics that demonstrate the remarkable success of their business acquisition strategy.
- Founded in 2004 with just an idea during a gap year
- Grown to 1,200+ employees across 20 international offices
- Completed 35 acquisitions to accelerate growth and market expansion
- Now generates 400 million monthly visits across portfolio brands
- Successfully reduced customer concentration from 50% to 25%
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Year Founded | 2004 |
| First Acquisition Year | 2017 |
| Total Acquisitions | 35 |
| Current Employees | 1,200+ |
| Annual Revenue (2023) | €111 million |
| Free Cash Flow (2023) | €55-75 million |
Jesper Søgaard Method
Jesper’s approach to building Better Collective has been methodical yet adaptable, focusing on long-term value creation rather than short-term gains. His business acquisition strategy evolved organically as the company matured, with each phase building upon previous successes.
- Started with organic growth focusing on affiliate marketing in sports betting
- Developed strong content and SEO capabilities to drive audience growth
- Identified acquisition opportunities when competitors began consolidating
- Focused on acquiring strong brands with passionate audiences
- Balanced financial acquisitions with strategic purchases to enter new markets
Jesper Søgaard Tools
Throughout their growth journey, Jesper and his team at Better Collective have leveraged various tools and technologies to support their operations and business acquisition strategy. These tools have been critical in managing their expanding portfolio of businesses and maintaining operational efficiency.
- Analytics platforms to track performance across all acquired properties
- SEO tools to optimize content and improve search rankings
- Content management systems to support multiple brands and languages
- Communication tools to coordinate across global offices and teams
- Project management software to handle acquisition integration processes
Key Notes
Jesper Søgaard’s journey offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs looking to grow through acquisitions. His success is built on a foundation of complementary partnerships, long-term thinking, and strategic decision-making. Here are the most important takeaways from his experience.
- Complementary partnerships with different skill sets create stronger leadership
- Long-term thinking and compounding effects drive significant value creation
- Focus on acquiring strong brands with passionate, engaged audiences
- Balanced approach to capital allocation maximizes shareholder value
- Organizational development must keep pace with business growth
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
Inspired by Jesper’s success? Here’s how you can start implementing a business acquisition strategy in your own company. These five steps provide a roadmap for entrepreneurs looking to accelerate growth through strategic acquisitions.
- Build a strong foundation with organic growth and positive cash flow
- Develop expertise in your industry and identify acquisition opportunities
- Secure financing options through debt facilities or equity raising
- Start with smaller acquisitions to learn the integration process
- Scale your acquisition strategy as you gain experience and resources
Conclusion
Jesper Søgaard’s journey from a gap year idea to a $700 million holding company demonstrates the power of strategic business acquisition when executed thoughtfully. His business acquisition strategy evolved naturally as the company matured, allowing Better Collective to transform from a small European affiliate website into a global digital sports media powerhouse. The key lessons from Jesper’s experience emphasize the importance of complementary partnerships, long-term thinking, and maintaining operational excellence throughout rapid growth. For entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses, Jesper’s story provides both inspiration and a practical roadmap for successful acquisition-led growth.