Wellford Dillard is about to seal the largest acquisition yet for Nashville’s email marketing conglomerate that began with one of the city’s early technology stars. Dillard is CEO of CM Group, which evolved from investors’ 2017 purchase of local startup Emma to a company with nine brands and almost 1,000 employees worldwide. Those brands include Sailthru, Liveclicker and Selligent. Dillard now has a deal in place to buy Chicago-based Cheetah
Digital, adding a firm that boasts “large enterprise” clients from Hilton and Walgreens to Walt Disney, Neiman Marcus and Williams-Sonoma. “What we’ve set out to build is a home for every marketer. Now I think we have a home for everyone. We’ve built the right foundation,” Dillard said in an interview. “You don’t worry about outgrowing one platform. You move, and stay in the family.
“With Cheetah, now we can go all the way from some of the smallest marketers to some of the largest, most well-known brands in the world,” he added. “It brings a lot of the technology that our customers have
been asking for. Cheetah can be the innovation engine for all of our portfolio.”
The purchase price was not disclosed. Dillard said more information could come when the deal formally closes, which could happen in December.
For perspective, CM Group’s annual revenue jumped to $250 million with its purchase of Selligent one year ago this month. “Sailthru was big, Selligent was bigger, and this is the biggest,” Dillard said. The companies billed the deal as a merger. As part of the deal, CM Group and Cheetah will belong to a newly created parent company. It will
operate under the CM Group name, and Dillard will serve as its CEO. CM Group’s existing owners, including New York-based Insight Partners, will be majority owners of that new parent company. Cheetah’s majority owner, San Francisco-based Vector Capital, will be “a substantial minority owner of the combined company,” according to a press release.
The two have long been familiar with each other. In fact, Cheetah’s executive chairman, Peter McCormick, recruited Dillard to Emma and once served on that company’s board. Nashville remains the hub of CM Group, one of the city’s largest technology products companies, according to Business Journal research. CM Group employs more than 160 people locally and has a number of open positions. Nashville houses the company’s “deal desk,” whose analysts
pair a new client with the CM Group brand that best fits their needs.
“We’ll be very, very active. You’ll continue to see us do a lot,”
Dillard said about future acquisitions. “We’ll wind up with an enormous software company based here in Nashville. I really feel like it’ll help the gravitational pull … I hope it accelerates the amount of engineering talent moving in, and the amount of other software companies moving in.”
