Deal Maker of the Year – USA

About Stephen Day

Stephen Day is a co-founder and Managing Director of Navidar Group LLC. During his career, Stephen has executed over 100 M&A and financing transactions with deal volume totaling $22 billion, many of which have been cross-border. Navidar focuses on dynamic companies that have technology as part of their competitive differentiation. Navidar’s focus on the middle corridor of the U.S. with presences in Austin, Cleveland, Denver, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New York, and San Antonio has led to it being one of the fastest growing M&A and capital raising advisory firms in the region.

In leadership roles in the Global Technology Investment Banking groups at Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns in New York City, Stephen  led the execution of U.S. and cross border M&A (buy- side, sell-side, shareholder defense, carve-outs, spin-offs) and financing transactions for many of the world’s largest and leading technology and business services companies. He has provided M&A advisory services to leading companies such as Cognos, CSC, EMC, FreeMarkets, Geac, IBM, Internet Security Systems, Logica and MAPICS. He has also underwritten many equity (IPO and follow- on) and debt offerings for leading companies such as Accenture, Aspect Communications, Cognizant, CoStar Group, CSC, Infosys, Oracle, Patni, Sapient, SRA International, and VistaPrint.

Stephen received his BS from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business  with  a  concentration in Accounting and an  MBA  from  the  University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business with a concentration in Finance & International Business.

Firm Profile

Navidar was the exclusive financial advisor to Spanlink Communications in its sale to ConvergeOne. Spanlink is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota and was led by Eric LeBow, CEO. Spanlink is recognized by Cisco and its customers as a thought leader in the next-generation contact center sector and a one-stop shop for high-end Cisco collaboration services. These services span from contact center design, optimization and solution implementation, to a fully outsourced managed services offering.

The primary challenge in this transaction was being able to fully monetize the potential of Spanlink’s managed services SaaS technology platform. It is the leading solution focused on the Cisco technology stack and it provides proactive monitoring to be able to predict and prevent problems before they occur. By identifying root causes early, the SaaS platform is able to reduce the number of incidents in the contact center, increase uptime, accelerate recovery time, and significantly reduce operating expenses.

However, this SaaS solution could also be applied to Avaya technology, Cisco’s major competitor in the contact center sector.  Furthermore, it could be utilized to monitor and manage any enterprise network technology as well. As a result, the addressable market opportunity for this innovative technology is very large.

Navidar is one of the leading investment banking boutiques in the United States that has deep expertise in the IT Services sectors given our founding partners led this sector for some of the largest investment banking groups on Wall Street such as Goldman Sachs and UBS. Therefore, we positioned Spanlink as a “first” in this sector of managed services for the contact center sector. As a result of the positioning of Spanlink as an industry “first”, there was a broad range of interested parties from various different types of IT Services companies located in the U.S. and abroad.