Global
Think Hospitality — through partner James Hacon — advised Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) on the commercial due diligence and acquisition strategy behind its investment in Mapal Group, assessing the hospitality-technology landscape and shaping Mapal as the platform to consolidate it.
In 2019 PSG acquired a majority stake in Mapal, then a specialist workforce and back-of-house software provider for hospitality. PSG's ambition was to consolidate a fragmented market of point-solutions — training, compliance, workforce and kitchen management — into a single, scalable “hospitality operating system”. That required a clear, commercially grounded read on the landscape and the technologies worth acquiring.
This early diligence underpinned a deliberate acquisition programme — bringing together solutions including Flow Hospitality Training, Easilys and GetCompliant that would ultimately be unified into MAPAL OS, the group's hospitality operating system.
Following this initial advisory engagement, James Hacon joined Mapal as Global Chief Marketing Officer — among the leaders responsible for M&A sourcing and external commercial due diligence — and later provided strategic guidance through the group's growth and eventual exit, a transaction valued in the hundreds of millions.
