Domain registrar and Web hosting company GoDaddy Inc. filed for a $100 million public offering Monday.
While the company may be best known for race driver Danica Patrick’s flashy persona, the Scottsdale, Ariz. company is expanding in lateral directions to serve small businesses, by adding product and service lines.
Over the last few years, the company has begun repositioning itself as a one-stop-shop for small businesses — and not just for their Web hosting needs.
Some may focus on the negatives now that the company’s finances have been laid bare in preparation for the public offering. For example, CNN Money reports that GoDaddy has not been profitable since 2009, losing $200 million last year alone.
Years of Transformation
But this ignores the fact that, over the last few years, GoDaddy has undergone a significant transformation. During that time, GoDaddy has been pushing to become a platform that small businesses run their operations on.
Since 2012, the company has been on a bit of an acquisition spree.
Back in July of that year, the GoDaddy acquired Outright, a cloud-based financial management system.
In Aug. 2013, GoDaddy acquired Locu. The company specializes in maintaining consistent digital presence for small businesses over multiple online platforms.
In Oct. 2013, GoDaddy acquired both online invoicing service Ronin and fellow hosting service Media Temple.
Then there was the acquisition of online marketing platform Get Found in Jan. 2014.
GoDaddy at A Glance
Investment firms KKR & Co., Silver Lake Management LLC and Technology Crossover Ventures bought a stake in GoDaddy for $2.25 billion in 2011.
Together these firms now own more than half the company.
GoDaddy hopes to use proceeds from the IPO to repay debt and make a payment of $25 million to the three investment companies which hold the majority of the company, Bloomberg reports.
International Expansion
GoDaddy is positioning itself to become a resource for very small businesses internationally, too. GoDaddy now provides products and support in 17 languages, 14 markets and 44 different currencies.
Countries served (including the U.S.) are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain.
Back in May, company CEO Blake Irving told Small Business Trends:
“These small businesses need to be served by someone and no one is doing it today. Once you leave the USA it’s a very fragmented market landscape. No one is doing anything in a way that scales globally.”
Image: Small Business Trends
The acquisition binge they’ve been on for the last couple years was somewhat of an indicator, but I’m still surprised they’re going the IPO route. I guess people are feeling confident about the IPO market.
The horse has already bolted re: acquisitions, but if they weren’t making a profit, why were they then making multiple acquisitions? How did they fund it? Or is the funding of the acquisitions the reason why they’re still not in profit?