Robert Hyde realized he needed a new strategy.

“We can create new products, but it takes a lot of energy and effort to build and launch a product, and there’s only so much you can do at any given time,” says Hyde, the CEO of Payment Source, a company that provides alternative payment solutions. Payment Source got its start selling prepaid payment cards and vouchers when it first launched in 2014, and it quickly expanded its product offerings to manage tax payments as well as facilitate e-commerce payments and digital wallets for retailers. But that winning strategy could only take the company so far. “You get to a point where you can get stuck,” he says. 

So Hyde looked to another strategy: growth through acquisitions.

“We kind of naively said, ‘OK, let’s go buy a company,’” Hyde says. “But we didn’t have a good sense of who we wanted to buy, why we wanted to buy them, even who we should consider…

Robert Hyde realized he needed a new strategy.

“We can create new products, but it takes a lot of energy and effort to build and launch a product, and there’s only so much you can do at any given time,” says Hyde, the CEO of Payment Source, a company that provides alternative payment solutions. Payment Source got its start selling prepaid payment cards and vouchers when it first launched in 2014, and it quickly expanded its product offerings to manage tax payments as well as facilitate e-commerce payments and digital wallets for retailers. But that winning strategy could only take the company so far. “You get to a point where you can get stuck,” he says. 

So Hyde looked to another strategy: growth through acquisitions.

“We kind of naively said, ‘OK, let’s go buy a company,’” Hyde says. “But we didn’t have a good sense of who we wanted to buy, why we wanted to buy them, even who we should consider…