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Rock-It Cargo

Logistics and stage engineering for the live events industry

Opportunity

Calera spent over eighteen months building the relationship and developing the strategy with David Bernstein, founder and CEO, prior to our investment.  

  • Recognized opportunity to leverage high-touch, highly consequential freight forwarding model to expand into targeted new markets and to grow the Company’s footprint through acquisitions, JVs and greenfields.
  • Management had high level of confidence in the plan and David and the team rolled 60% of their value alongside Calera's investment.

Calera Supported Initiatives:

Calera partnered with the team at Rock-It to scale and diversify the business, open up new markets and build the infrastructure to support its dramatic growth, including:

  • New Markets:  Within its core freight forwarding platform, the team led expansion by entering other high-touch, highly consequential markets such as fine art, specialty automotive, and temporary power.
  • Geographic Expansion:  Through the opening of new offices and establishing joint ventures in geographies where the company was directing significant freight volume, Rock-It dramatically expanded its footprint including offices in South America, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and China.
  • Acquisitions: With Calera's support, Rock-it completed targeted acquisitions that furthered its expansion into new markets and geographies.  Calera also partnered with the Rock-It team in the acquisition of Tait, another management-owned and led business. Tait provides set design and construction with a similarly strong market share position to Rock-It in music touring. Through the further add-on of Stage Tech, Tait extended its leading share position to the permanent installation market and provided another vertical for further growth.
  • Senior Management: Calera worked with founder and CEO David Bernstein and his team to make several management additions which helped support efforts around system implementations, institution of best practices, and the development of necessary infrastructure to support growth.

Overall Results

These initiatives led to a compelling growth story while staying true to the culture at the heart of the business.

  • The initiatives resulted in a business with greater end market diversity and defensibility, expanded growth runway, margin improvement and the infrastructure to support significantly greater scale.
  • Rock-It's EBITDA increased by over 5x over our investment period all while staying consistent with business’ core value proposition. 
5x EBITDA
Increase
7 Synergistic
Acquisitions
+20% YoY Organic
Growth

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