 How are you doing today? I'm your host Rich. Here we have Rich to be live with a very special guest, Ghassan Halazan, the CEO of Emerge Commerce. How are you doing today Ghassan? I'm great. Rich good to be with you. I'm a fan of the program. Very excited to have you on the show and learn more about your company. Why don't we get started by you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with Emerge Commerce. Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm the founder and CEO of Emerge. We've been in business for about five years now. My background is in investment banking and in e-commerce. I've been doing e-commerce for about a decade plus now. You know, building, acquiring, selling, restructuring e-commerce businesses for living. And you know, leveraging some of my background in capital markets, in M&A, really put together what we think is the smarter way to scale e-commerce companies. And that's to say buying is a far more cost effective means to arrive at scale than building it from the ground up. So we're going out there and basically putting together a preeminent portfolio of digital brands online in e-cars. That's exciting. Now, we love to understand the milestones that you're looking to achieve. Can you talk a little bit about the milestones that you've achieved so far in the first nine months of 2021 and what you're looking to achieve for the remainder of 2021? Sure. So we went public here in Toronto on the TSXV, December of last year. And you know, pretty much since then, our focus as an M&A-driven business is to obviously acquire quality acquisition targets. And we've done just that. You know, within two weeks of going public, pretty much by Jan 4, we announced our landmark transaction of acquiring True Local, TRU Local. It is the market leader in premium meat subscriptions. So it connects local farmers with a digitally savvy health conscious audience looking to save on meat delivery, monthly meat delivery through frozen boxes. So things like grass, beef, chicken, seafood, bacon. And from that perspective, that business basically tripled our revenue at the time from about $9 million at the time of going public to just under $30 million. More recently, in fact, yesterday, we announced the closing of our Battlebox Group transaction. So Battlebox Group is an outdoor gear, camping, hiking, good subscription box business that comes with its sister site, Carnivore Club, which is a cured meats business. All that's to say, we've acquired another about $28 million in revenue and about $4 million in EBITDA, importantly. So that puts us at a collective sort of 5x from the time we went public in terms of the acquisition firepower that we've brought on both in revenue as well as in EBITDA. That's something we pride ourselves on. Really sort of that disciplined M&A and capital allocation approach that we've given our portfolio. And then from a pure operating and business perspective, we've been able to, we've only reported two quarters. So Q1 and Q2, obviously Q3 is on the horizon. But we've delivered triple digit revenue growth in both quarters, obviously to some extent M&A driven, but we keep our pulse on the organic growth as well. And we've also now delivered six consecutive quarters of adjusted deposit. So to my point, we're doing this sustainably. We're building it up brick by brick, acquiring top-notch e-commerce assets and putting them together in a portfolio where they share resources, technology, data, M&A, capital markets. Fantastic. Now here at Rich DGLAB, we love to really understand the fundamentals of the company and the team behind the deal. Can you talk a little bit about your key members and what they bring to the table and especially any experience they have in capital markets? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we've been very fortunate. I've been surrounded by a plethora of experience in M&A, capital markets, you know, e-commerce and tech at large, a lot of great folks around us. But starting with, you know, of course, the immediate management team, Jonathan Leon, our CFO, came most recently from a billion-dollar roll-up in veterinary clinics called FET Strategy, Private Equity Back Name. Originally it was the CFO at AFRIA, the original CFO in AFRIA. You know, we have George Marrucos joined us from Diane Durham, which is, again, a big Canadian legal software roll-up story, now a $3 billion plus market cap. He was on the senior leadership team at Diane Durham, joins us and heads up the M&A business, which as you know, is a big part of our approach and sort of strategy. Fazl Kajski is our CFO. He joined us from the original roll-up we acquired a company called Bytopia, which was Michel Romano's business from Clearco and Dragonsten. So we acquired the original deals business. They had collectively sold Snapsaves to Groupon, which was a cashback rewards app. And you know, so from our perspective, that's sort of that core management team. As I said, I come from a capital markets background myself with about 10 years plus in e-commerce, but prior to that, with my days at City Group in New York on Wall Street. We have other great folks. Our chairman and our partner here, Drew Green from Indoshino, is obviously someone who's been involved in the capital markets heavily alongside various of our other partners. And from that perspective, we feel that we have a lot of firepower for both M&A as well as capital markets combined with e-commerce. That's exciting. It sounds like you have a dream team that you've put together to really build this company. And I was looking at your portfolio of companies that you guys have really been putting together. You mentioned some of them. Battlebox, Carnivore Club, True Local. These are assets that you've acquired that you really you've put into the company. And my question is, what's the potential growth for these assets? What how big can they scale? What's the potential potential revenue for these companies? Can you speak on those assets and what the potential is for them? Yeah, it's always nice to talk potential and blue skies, but let's start with what they've been doing and how they've been growing because I think that's very telling of the caliber of the assets that we're sitting on. True Local is a business that we acquired in December of 2020. They had just grown from nine million dollars a year in revenue to 20 million dollars a year in that year. Of course, big pandemic driven push and awareness and grocery online was a big theme. There were a lot of questions around, you know, does that 20 million dollars go back to 15 or to nine even? Or is this the new norm? And so far, what we've seen is that we are still till today as the world opens up at two X three pandemic volumes. And we're not talking about having no market to be two X. This is just a new world we're in, which is super exciting to see. So for us, these businesses have healthy organic growth, underlying all of that great brand equity and incredible customer retention. And so for us, the other example here with Battlebox and Carnivore Club, which come as a portfolio together, that's a business that grew 70% in the pandemic year from about 10 million USD to about 17 million USD. And in the recent sort of trading 12 month period that we looked at the deal as of May 2021, that business was still on a 30% organic growth rate, which shows you that despite the prior year being such a difficult call, we're still seeing good organic growth, keeping in mind, these brands could grow even much larger if we weren't prioritizing a good balance with profitability today. You know, there are a lot of businesses that will burn through boatloads of capitalism, as you know, technically need commerce, especially chasing much bigger scale before reverse engineering profitability, if they're lucky to get there. We don't work on luck. We are here to buy disciplined, profitable, strong organic growth businesses. And so for both of those and frankly, any vertical we enter, we want to see that $100 million opportunity per vertical over the next three to four years. And that's both organically and through token acquisitions. Wow, that's impressive. Now it's extremely important to understand your competition. Can you explain what makes you guys unique and different and how you compare it to some of your competitors in the e-commerce space? Yeah, absolutely. So there's two types of competitors that we look at. The first one is other consolidators of e-commerce businesses. And so, and that's a big space now, that's a very exciting new trend. There's about $10 billion that have been poured into e-commerce consolidators. And a lot of that capital and a lot of those big players are focused on the Amazon roll up opportunity, buying Amazon stores, FBA stores. We are not an Amazon specific marketplace consolidator. We actually prefer buying proven brands, direct to consumer businesses that own their assets, own their customer bases, and are not at the risk of being turned off. We've all heard the different horror stories of relying too heavily on an Amazon or on a Google or on a Facebook, right? With the flip of a button, you might lose your ranking, you might lose your audience. So we're really focused on buying these brand driven businesses like a true local, like a battle box, like an underbar for golf, and owning that ecosystem ourselves. And so that's kind of for us, the edge is in the authenticity in absolutely having a direct relationship with the customer. Whereas a lot of the other consolidators may be relying on sort of a big giant like Amazon to actually access audience. So that's one big advantage. The other type of competitor is really sort of within each vertical. So, you know, within meets or within golf or within experiences, we have competitors. What I love about our ecosystem is the advantage that we are able to diversify and leverage our collective buying powers. We have two million members. So when we go buy a carnival club, we already have a true local audience that we can cross that with, right? And they can share facilities together, they can cross reference, you know, different things that are working on the marketing side or on the data side, we can monetize collectively. So it's there's power in the diversification and there's frankly power in scale. And so for us, every time we're buying a business, we're not only buying more revenue or more even though we're also buying that trove of data and those potential possibilities between the brands that we're sitting on. So for example, a loyalty program is something that we would look at Delta line, where when you're shopping here, you're getting points that you can use across any number of different verticals and niches that we're in. That sounds really exciting. Now we love to understand the share structure here at Rich DG Live. We're fundamental investors, mostly long term investors. And we're looking for companies that undervalued, underappreciated, underexposed. Can you speak on the share structure and how you intend to attract more retail alongside institutional investors? Yeah, absolutely. So we have about 99 million shares outstanding today. And on top of that, we have largely sort of an ESOP options plan for staff, predominantly staff, board management and so forth, with with about a couple of million warrants as well from the earlier rounds, most of which I shouldn't say was probably half of which are out of the money and half of which are in the money. But all of a sudden done, you're looking at about 110 million shares under a treasury method that on a fully diluted basis. Very good. And if there was one thing you would want shareholders that are watching this interview today to know about your company, what would it be? Yeah, I think, you know, the big thing to highlight for someone just getting to know and merge is that we're in the business of underpromising over delivering. So we've continuously delivered on our ability to acquire better, bigger and more profitable assets to the point now where, you know, six acquisitions and seven brands in our portfolio today, we're effectively about an acquisition away right now, one acquisition away from arriving at about $100 million in gross sales, what we call GMS or gross merchandise sales. Yeah. And we're basically two acquisitions or so away from arriving at 10 million in EBITDA. And we think that's a those are critical milestones to your point about institutional and retail. We think, you know, today, for example, Catacord Genuity and Raymond James cover the company consensus price today is $1.77. We think a lot of research pours in at those scalable levels, right, a couple of deals away or a couple of acquisitions away. And so for us, scale matters, but even more so profitable scale matters and institutional folks who have started to jump into emerge our last couple of rounds have been pretty much 50 50 institutional retail. Today we have over 3000 shareholders in emerge. So we have a good retail constituency by virtue of the fact that, frankly, we have two million members. And even if we haven't market too heavily to them, word has gone out, we get a lot of free press because of our brand awareness and our brand equity. But we've yet to really arrive at a scale that's super exciting for these big institutionals that I think are a game changer from a share price perspective. But I think we're right around the corner where we knock off critical milestones that get us to 100 million top line 10 million even dog. And I think we're right there. And I think two research analysts become 458, you know, and I think, you know, that institutional presence starts becoming bigger and bigger. And of course, the retail network by virtue of it being a consumer play will always be a strong component. We have investors all over the world that are going to see this interview that are going to be learning more about your company. What's the best way for them to get in contact with you if they have any questions? So we have an investor at emerge.brands.com address. We answer very promptly through our IR unit. Obviously, we're very active. I'm personally very active on LinkedIn. And of course, if you need to reach me directly as well, just reach out to the investor at emerge.brands.com or access me through Kisan at emerge.brands.com. And one of us will get back to you in short or fantastic. Now, I must remind you guys that are watching. If you like these videos, please smash the like button, comment down below, share the video everywhere and subscribe. Ridge TV live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence, do your research before you. That's it. Anything that we talk about or discuss here on Ridge TV live in saying that I believe this company is undervalued, underappreciated, under exposed. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kisan. Thanks so much for having us. Always a pleasure. If you're not winning, you're not watching, we bring you the winners and we bring them to you first. Thank you for watching everybody. Have a nice day.