Career Progression Stories: Raymond Hua

We caught up with Raymond, Vice President of M&A at CORA, to talk about his career progression, his role at Jonas, our ABCs, and more!

Thank you, Raymond, for sharing your story with us. Looking for a successful career like Raymond’s? Learn how you can join the Jonas Software family by clicking the button below:

Career Progession Stories Interview Transcript

My name is Raymond Hua, I’m the vice president of M&A for the CORA group, one of the six portfolios within Jonas.  So, our M& A team is a very important component of what Jonas and CORA do. We’re big believers in finding great companies that are already doing fantastic things out there and, finding an opportunity to add them to our portfolio. We acquire these companies for life, so we’re trying to provide a long-term home for these businesses, bringing on all the employees and hopefully adding them to our group and elevating them. Hopefully, one day they’ll be acquiring new businesses of their own. That’s a big part of our philosophy here at CORA with Jonas.

Before joining Jonas, I worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, an audit firm that is probably pretty well known. So, I did a lot of audit work, which a lot of people don’t really like, but I actually quite enjoyed it. The best part about audit is that you go to a lot of different clients. You get to meet a lot of different people and learn about their business. Some people kind of found it tedious. You go through a lot of data requests, you’re hounding people, you know, working pretty late nights and long weekends. I took a lot of great learnings from that experience. What I really took away from that the most that I brought to Jonas was I really liked working with different companies and learning about what they did. That experience was invaluable when I joined. A lot of the people within Jonas and CORA are ex-auditors; they came from a lot of different firms like KPMG and PWC, so I found a lot of kindred spirits here when I first joined.

A typical day, I’d say it’s really hard to characterize a typical day because, in mergers and acquisitions, it’s all about the different projects and companies that you’re talking to at that time, right. Underneath my group, I’ve split it into two departments. Part of it is working on business development, going out there trying to find great companies. starting up conversations, understanding their story, type of product, their customers, their employees, and what they’re looking to do with their business. So I have a great team that’s out there having these conversations day in and day out, and to some extent, I get looped in to, you know, add a little bit of my perspective. The other half of my team is what we call deal execution. Once we align with the prospect on terms and valuation, we’re able to go ahead and really dive deep. This is where all of my previous experience in audit and finance comes into play and so we’ll go through all of the motions and dig in deep into the company. Really work with the sellers, advisors, bankers or accountants, and lawyers. There’s a lot of project management on that side so our day to day can really vary from those two components.

I think the part that I enjoy the most about my role is just the variety of people that I work with, both within Jonas and CORA, and also with the prospects and the companies that we’re talking to on a regular basis. So, I’m not stuck or relegated to a single industry. I’m not only talking to accountants every day. With the people within my team, you get a really great, vibrant mix of backgrounds. I’m talking to salespeople. I’m talking to marketing, lawyers, HR people, and so I think it really helps me become a little more well-rounded and a little deeper than just the numbers, which I think is important if you want to grow as a leader and as a person. Software is everywhere nowadays. We started out at Cora just focusing on a couple of verticals and in the five years since we’ve sort of split out as CORA we’ve learned about hundreds of different companies and verticals and acquired into verticals that we never had any idea about at the very beginning of our conversations. Getting a glimpse into their world is just incredible. It’s a great experience.

That’s a loaded question because what is culture, right? Jonas is made up today of six different operating groups, and within those operating groups, you have 140, maybe 150 distinct businesses. We are big believers and having each of those businesses and each of those portfolios maintain its own culture. So ultimately when we split off and created the CORA brand. We had to try to figure out what did we stand for differently. CORA is actually an acronym, it stands for Collective Organization Redefining Advancement. So, our whole philosophy is around employee mobility, trying to give people different experiences, whether it’s vertical movement but it could also be horizontal movement and trying out different departments and figuring out what they like best, what they excel at. To us, that’s what our culture is at the core level. Within the companies that we’ve acquired, it might vary quite a bit, so we want to keep that intact, as that’s what made them a successful business from day one.

When I came in, I was fairly junior. And I was very skeptical about a lot of the values that we put on our website and our marketing materials. I’ve been with the company over seven years now and I’ve helped Jonas and CORA acquire over 20 businesses. Over that period, I can actually see the results from those early acquisitions where we’re going out there and sharing the story about autonomy and maintaining their culture and then really carry it through to today. Where those employees and companies that we acquired, you know, six, seven years ago, um, there’s still a group of employees there that have accelerated their careers, grown their business, really done things that they couldn’t have done without us helping them along and us being advisors to them. Nothing can speak louder than that experience. Especially when you go to events and see these people and talk to them and just really see how they’ve grown themselves and how the business is flourishing under our leadership while still maintaining a lot of what made them unique from day one. I’m very fortunate to be at the front lines of seeing that because I get to help execute on the acquisitions and then afterwards, hear the story of those businesses, when they join our family.

I’ve been here for seven years, which is a long time and from day one, I looked at Jonas as a company and kind of looked at it and said, wow, it’s already grown to 60, 70 businesses. That’s so much. Constellation. I think at that point was probably 300 businesses. I thought how much more can this grow, right? And today, at a Jonas level, we’ve grown to 150 brands. We’ve been able to split ourselves out as CORA and we continue to rapidly grow. Every day is just new change and experience of rapid growth. And that gets me really excited. I truly do believe in the story of what we’ve already done in the past, I’ve been a big part of what has been executed in the last couple of years, and we have a very big vision to continue growing CORA. It’s been done before. I’ve been a part of getting it done. I also look forward to keep leveraging my experience, I really transitioned myself from a bit of the doer to a bit more of a mentor to help grow my team and have other people kind of go through that same experience that I did. That gets me very excited to kind of be that mentor for my team today.

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