Durrants has acquired Gorkana less than five-months after its acquisition of Metrica.

Durrants is a business that under the leadership of managing director Jeremy Thompson has set its sights firmly on modernising the workflow of PR agencies and in-house teams. I caught up with Thompson this morning to ask him about the deal.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the deal is worth £20m. How did you arrive at a valuation and what’s the structure of the deal?
We are not sure where The Telegraph got its numbers from but we are not disclosing the consideration. What we will say is that the combined group of Durrants, Metrica and Gorkana will have revenues in excess of £40m and over 5,000 customers. The founders, Alex Northcott and Michael Webster, are staying with the business to help us build the ultimate support service for PR professionals.

What’s your relationship with Exponent?
Exponent Private Equity is our primary investor. They backed a Management Buy out of Durrants in 2006, and have supported us through the latest round of acquisitions including Metrica and Gorkana. They are very supportive of our strategy to grow and transform the business and have helped us make it happen.

What’s the strategy for Durrants with Gorkana and Metrica on board?
Our strategy is to build a unique proposition which combines the 3 market leaders in three key steps of the PR workflow – planning, monitoring and evaluation. We have the pieces, now we plan to put them together and transform the sector. Watch this space.

Have you any more acquisitions planned?
We have now got the pieces we have long identified as being the leaders in this sector. We now need to focus on putting them together to build the killer application. That is going to occupy us for the foreseeable future. So no more planned for now.

How soon can we get an enterprise deal for Durrants, Gorkana and Metrica products and services?
We’re not going to rush to integrate. The key is stability, and to build something really special for the long term. We are very happy to do enterprise deals from day one though, and have already done a number for Durrants and Metrica combined services. So give us a call.

PR spam is a massive issue for the industry at the moment. What are Gorkana’s plans to tackle this?
Getting PRs to engage with journalists in an intelligent way is at the heart of everything Gorkana does. Gorkana works with the PR industry to target journalists with stories and information they want via regular breakfast briefings, networking events and Gorkana features, such as regional mapping and headline coverage, and to help PRs build more targeted media lists. From a technical point of view Gorkana stops duplicate emails being sent to the same journalists and regularly monitors over-sized media lists.  I know it’s an issue that’s close to the heart of Gorkana’s CEO Alex Northcott and he’s keen to engage with the industry and hear about other ways to tackle spam head on.

Is there anything else you want to share with the PR industry?
There is plenty we want to share over the coming months. We really believe that what we’re doing is going to transform our industry. We’ll keep you posted on the journey. This idea emerged from market research, so it is entirely customer driven. We’ll keep engaging with our customers along the way to make sure we’re getting it right. We want to share, and to hear back.