Sean O'Neill, Nash Advisory

For some reason, I gravitated more towards mogul skiing. That's where you bounce from bump to bump going down the hill. It's a lot of compression, and absorption on the legs. And as you get better and better, you wanna go faster, faster, you take a lot of knocks, you crash a lot. You learn to get up, you learn to do it again, and so repetition, training, repetition, is sort of a philosophy of mine that led me well throughout my career.

Sean O'Neil, Managing Director of Nash Advisory

In short, it's a lot like working in the M&A space.

Sean and his co-founder Lucas founded Nash Advisory in 2016, after a friendship that was connected by a strong interest in business. The name Nash is predicated on game theory, named after mathematician John Nash. Since then, the firm has grown into a team of 25 employees based in Melbourne.

"We've always wanted to innovate in the field. As time has progressed, the volume of data on a transaction has increased immensely. The number of advisors on a deal has increased. The complexity of deals have increased. So we've always been pushing innovation, whether it's our own internal CRM systems, our business development tools, our big data tools we use to analyse our client's data, or our global networks in order to find the right buyer for our client," said Sean.

To fuel their innovation and growth, Nash has been on an enterprise agreement with Ansarada for the last five years.

"I would estimate we would run twelve different rooms a year, and transactions are getting more chaotic. Hundreds of parties involved on a transaction, thousands of files. Ansarada helps us bring order to that chaos. I think the Ansarada platform has really developed over time. The Q&A modules get more sophisticated. You have the ability to host more data on the platform, share it discreetly with different teams, different parties. Confidentiality has developed over time."

While the Ansarada data room of a decade ago was due diligence focused, today Nash uses the advanced Deals platform to manage transactions from end to end. "Now it's a program that we use for six to twelve months during the whole process. So right from planning through to execution and completion accounts," he said.