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Last year was a period of onboarding for leaders at CMG Companies, after the ownership group inked 14 deals across three brands for 118 locations.
In 2024, the Plano, Texas-based group added well over 100 units with Ace Hardware, Little Caesars and Sonic Drive-In, all of it completed with the organization's own capital. It marked the expansion of a portfolio with several restaurant concepts and brands in other industries, and the flurry of deals earned CMG a Franchise Times Dealmakers award last year.
Today, the group has 160 stores with both KFC and Taco Bell, along with 271 Sonic units, 61 Little Caesars restaurants, 40 Ace Hardware outlets and seven Valvoline Instant Oil Change shops. CMG also added Arby's and Dunkin' to its system, acquiring 121 units with the former and developing a pipeline of new coffee shops with the latter.
Established 25 years ago, CMG Companies operates more than 600 units across the aforementioned brands, along with other concepts. For much of its history, founding partner Al Bhakta said its expansion has largely come through M&A activity.
"We develop in our brands and the franchisors want us to develop so we continue to do that," Bhakta said. "However, we like the potential of acquisitions. The opportunities come along, and we'll buy 100 stores at a time if we can get them. We're opportunistic, and sometimes the deals are larger, while sometimes we have to do a lot more smaller deals to get where we want to be."
That was the case in 2024, with a plethora of transactions taking place, and many of those were completed late in the year. Cory Posey, director of M&A at CMG, said all that activity led to a slowdown in transactions for 2025 as the organization worked to manage the new locations, and the accompanying employees.
"For 2025, with that many units, we wanted to focus on them being acclimated into our system," Posey said. "We did a transaction with Little Caesars. It didn't mean we were less busy, because we're still taking on those new stores. We were just more focused on the existing portfolio."
Navin Nagrani, another founding partner with CMG, said while it takes plenty of effort to integrate new units, doing so has become second nature for the group thanks to its years of M&A experience.
Source: Yahoo Finance Top News — This article was automatically imported from the source. Read full article at original source →
