On Friday, June 7, Textura, a provider of cloud construction management solutions, achieved something that was a year and a half in the making. The company’s executives had been formally planning the event for the better part of a year, an effort that resulted in this city’s first tech IPO in over 18 months.
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The Deerfield based company offered five million shares at $15 apiece, trading under the symbol TXTR. But the stock surpassed expectations, peaking at around $24 per share before resting at $20.91, 39% higher than the offer. Based on that, the company’s market capitalization is $475 million.
“We’re very pleased with how the market opened and how the stock has traded since then,” co-founder, chairman and CEO Pat Allin says.
For Allin, the IPO represents the hard work he and his team have put into building Textura into a lasting company since its launch in 2004.
“What do we want to do?” he says. “Global domination.”
Currently, the company’s 300 employees serve clients across America but Allin says the next step is expanding abroad. Starting with a joint venture in Australia and New Zealand, he looks to establish a presence across other parts of the globe in the next 18 to 24 months.
Allin says the company has seen growth topping 100% each year. Despite strong sales, which may reach $30 million this year according to some reports, Textura has not yet turned a profit. Still, private investors have contributed to funding the company so far and now, with the $80 million raised by the IPO, paying down debts and having fresh capital should help move toward profitability.
“It provides the capital we need to exercise our strategy,” Allin says. “It provides some flexibility for our shareholders. It creates value for our employees who have stock options.”
Allin says Textura’s greatest asset is his people, noting that employee turnover is low and that he has groomed young individuals to become executives. The company’s recent trend has been to hire about 20 new employees per month, which he says is not about to change any time soon. One of Allin’s main goals is to become a more attractive employer for local talent. He wants to see graduates from Illinois universities remaining here for jobs.
Following the IPO, Allin says he met with 121 institutional investors to discuss Textura and found that they were most impressed by what they referred to as the company’s “Midwest culture.”
“I’m hoping that [those investors] will start looking at the Midwest and the Chicago area as a real source of high-growth, mature technology companies that have a lot of characteristics that, quite frankly, a lot of other technology companies do not have,” Allin.
To put it in construction terms, Allin is not looking to sell or flip his company at all. Instead, he plans to build on the solid foundation he spent nearly nine years putting in place. All that is to say that Allin is well on his way to global domination.
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