Orotek snares $10 million in funding
Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Urvaksh Karkaria Staff Writer
Norcross, Ga.-based Orotek Inc. raised $10 million in venture financing to snap up hobbled competitors and broaden its market reach.
Orotek does direct sales, installations and infrastructure construction for cable and broadband providers, such as Comcast and Time Warner.
The three-year-old firm, which employs 70, reported 2008 revenues of about $3.5 million. Orotek plans to hit $10 million in revenues over the next two years by signing on new cable providers and winning additional business from existing customers, Vice President of Finance Scott McDonald told Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Orotek plans to use the $10 million financing it raised from Atlanta-based SouthFund Partners to acquire an existing installation company.
“The best way for us to meet the immediate needs of the cable and broadband providers is to seek out and acquire companies with ... contracts already in place,” Orotek CEO William Brantley said. “This may mean several acquisitions in order to expand into multiple markets quickly.”
Orotek hopes to leverage the depressed economy to pick businesses on the cheap.
“We feel that with credit facilities tightening, certain companies will come available to us that in the past wouldn’t have” McDonald said. “There is no doubt that we are looking at companies that are potentially distressed.”
As telcos and satellite providers shoehorn into the cable business, it provides opportunity for direct sellers such as Orotek, whose employees go door-to-door peddling cable and broadband services.
Cable companies “get very aggressive in trying to get these subscribers,” Brantley said. “It’s a battleground and [direct sales] is an effective guerrilla tactic.”
