Leading Gold Coast executive Mike Timoney gives his tips for getting company floated on stock market

A LEADING Gold Coast CEO has given his take on the arduous journey of completing an ASX listing. Tip: It is a marathon, not a sprint.

GOLD Coast businessman Mike Timoney’s first attempt at listing on the stock exchange 10 years ago did not go to plan.

Mr Timoney had engaged with advisers at KPMG and Goldman Sachs about listing his dental consolidation group Dental Partners, which he founded in 2007.

His Totally Teeth chain by 2008 had achieved revenue of $3.5 million in less than three years, employing nine dentists, and servicing 20,000 customers.

However, timing is everything, and despite months of work, the effort was a bust.

“The whole thing got derailed by the Global Financial Crisis,” Mr Timoney told the Bulletin ahead of speaking at the Growth, Strategy & Investment Forum hosted by Gold Coast Leaders today at the Home of the Arts.

Gary Carroll, of G8 Education, will also speak at the Growth, Strategy & Investment Forum. Photo: Steve Holland

But it was the relationships forged more than a decade ago with Lynda Woods, of Morgans, and Anne-Maree Keane, of KPMG, that served Mr Timoney so well when he had a second crack at listing this year and succeeded.

“They are an example of two ladies who gave me the time of day when I was nothing and ended up getting a substantial amount of business for their companies when we listed in 2018,” he said.

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“Too many businesspeople have too short a time frame. Very few people play the long game and that is often to their detriment.”

Mr Timoney will speak today alongside Heath Hill, the branch manager of Morgans Gold Coast, on the “Anatomy of a listing: Ins and Outs of an ASX listing”.

Sean Braybrook is a director of Gold Coast Leaders, which is hosting the Growth, Strategy & Investment Forum. Picture: David Clark

His Gold Coast-based ASX listed dental company Smiles Inclusive listed in April this year.

It has a market capitalisation of close to $60 million and works under a partnership model, whereby dentists who sold their clinics remain investors in the business.

Mr Timoney likened a listing to running a marathon.

He said it was important not to get bogged down on the detail, take it a day at a time, and keep the end goal in mind.

“When I ran the marathon (in London) you concentrate on the next kilometre, you don’t think, I’ve got 42 more of these to do, you say, I’ll get from 30 to 31, and 31 to 32, let’s not go too fast because you will blow yourself up but don’t go too slow either,” he said.

“That is a good analogy for doing an IPO, you have just gotta get in the stride, but don’t disillusion yourself with the workload in front of you.”

Mr Timoney said the reasons for doing the listing were threefold: visibility of ownership, access to capital markets, and credibility.

“There is a lot of credibility with being listed on the stock market,” he said.

“So when you are dealing with suppliers, when you are dealing with third parties, they know you are operating at a very high level of compliance, you have a competent management team, and you are operating with best practice.”

The process started in March, 2017, and took 392 days from beginning to end.

Mr Timoney said the first step was to organise a “great team” made up of the lawyer (Talbot Sayer), accountant (KPMG) and stockbroker (Morgans).

He said a “quality” team will be taken seriously by ASIC and the ASX rather than firms with no track record.

Mr Timoney said writing the prospectus was a difficult task.

“When we wrote the prospectus, we had the lawyers, brokers, accountants, all in the same room, as well as the Smiles team,” he said.

“Everyone had to agree to every single sentence and paragraph in a 120-page document. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But we did it.”

He said the business also needs a point of difference from competitors.

In the case of Smiles Inclusive it was the ownership model, which had dentists reinvest the proceeds of the sale back into the business.

He said the investor roadshow, which preceded the Initial Public Offering, was a slog, involving 47 one-hour meetings over a two-week period in major Australasian cities.

“It was five to eight presentations per day for two weeks in the capitals presenting to all the fund managers. That was very hard to stay focused. However, we ended up being five times oversubscribed by the institutions so they all loved our story.”

Mr Timoney said the entire experience was an “emotional rollercoaster” but one he is proud to have gone through.

“I sat down with a blank piece of paper with no investors and took it to a $60 million company in 392 days, which is remarkable.”