EDINBURGH-based Bertram Nursery Group has returned to the acquisition trail after landing a £4 million funding package from Santander.
The private nursery firm has tapped into the funding to acquire the four-strong Oranges & Lemons group in Dundee, taking its portfolio to 36 across Scotland and the north-west of England.
And founder Graeme Scott expects that number to increase by 40 by the end of the year, noting the group should comfortably hit 60 given the strength of the management team.
Bertram currently has two sites already in development in Glasgow, one in Edinburgh and one in Aberdeen.
The latest acquisitions restore a trend which has seen Bertram grow through acquisitions since it was founded in 2000, starting with the purchase of a former nursing home in Edinburgh and its conversion into a 100-place nursery.
That was followed by the addition of nurseries in Aberdeen in 2002 and Glasgow in 2006, before the acquisition of Happipots swelled its number by 12 in central Scotland in 2007. Its biggest deal to date came with the Holyrood Nursery Group, which gave it 15 sites in the north-west of England.
Mr Scott cited Santander's appetite for backing the SME (small and medium-sized businesses) as crucial to securing the latest additions.
He said: "They have a very good team, they tend to have experts so you are not dealing with general practitioner bankers, you are dealing with sector experts.
"The people we deal with purely deal with the care sector, so they understand your business and they understand the risk or lack of risk on the deals that you are doing."
The deal secured by Bertram includes £1.5 m illion growth capital facility, provided on a cash flow basis. Made available under the bank's Breakthrough programme, it is designed to help fast-growing small businesses accelerate their growth potential.
Some of the funding secured by Bertram will be used to expand its existing sites.
Explaining that staff numbers are on track to rise to nearly 900, Mr Scott said access to capital for SMEs in Scotland was improving, but added: "At the end of the day, some banks have better balance sheets than others, and that's just a fact of life.
"And businesses just have to lend according to what is right for them. Santander just seem to be prepared to risk more than others."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article