CFO Intelligence Magazine – Winter 2022
Barry Lederman
Perimeter Solutions, CFO
Before joining Perimeter Solutions as CFO in 2019, Barry Lederman had helped prep a company for a sale to a private equity firm. Still, he had never participated in a public offering. In 2021, however, Lederman boned up on the public process and successfully shepherded Perimeter Solutions a global manufacturer of firefighting products and lubricant additives headquartered in St. Louis through a rapid-fire reverse IPO. And did it while recuperating from heart surgery.
Whatever it takes
Perimeter Solutions CFO Barry Lederman wasn’t going to let anything get between him and the company’s fast-track IPO not even heart surgery.
“At the time I came on board, Perimeter Solutions was owned by SK Capital, a private equity firm” Lederman tells CFO Intelligence. “But about a year later, we were approached by a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) called EverArc Holdings that traded on the LSE (London Stock Exchange). EverArc wanted to buy us out and take us public and relist on a U.S. Stock Exchange.” EverArc offered “all the positives of a SPAC and none of the typical drawbacks seen with U.S. based SPACs,” he adds.
The buyout, valued at about US$2 billion, was announced in June 2021, and satisfied at least two goals: prior owner SK Capital monetized its investment; and going public through a SPAC, specifically, would give Perimeter’s new owners faster access to public-market funds since the listing could be done in as little as three months, compared to up to nine months or more in a traditional IPO.
“An IPO is never simple, but since a SPAC involves an already-listed company, you can cut out some extra steps,” he notes. “Still, there were challenges, particularly around recasting our books and records from our private-company accounting methods to public company GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). That included revaluing assets from 2018 — when SK Capital had acquired Perimeter Solutions — as well as recasting the amortization of goodwill, intangible assets and tax accounting. And our timeline called for getting everything done within about three months, including an audit by an independent CPA firm.”