Story House Early Learning seeks investment partners to support growth plans

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) provider Story House Early Learning has teamed up with corporate advisor Miles Advisory Partners in a bid to seek new investors to help support the funding of the next round of its current growth plans. 

Story House, which was founded in 2017, currently operates 38 centres located across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria with a further 12 not yet open but accepting new family enquiries. 

The Group operates a multi-brand strategy of which Story House is the main brand with some acquired groups, such as Queensland based Oak Early Education and Kew Kids Early Learning in Victoria, retaining their brand identity.  

Story House has adopted a targeted clustering strategy by opening or acquiring services that are proximate to each other which in turn enables support office and operations teams to more easily support them and gives scope to pool labour resources across services as required. 

According to an article originally published in the Australian Financial Review, Story House is looking for growth minded investment partners to help fund the next stage of its growth which includes the opening of its current pipeline and possibly new acquisitions. 

The business, excluding support office costs, is expected to generate $21 million earnings before interest,taxes, depreciation and amortisation from revenue of $117 million with both metrics signaled to move substantially higher in 2022 and 2023. 

Corporate activity in the ECEC sector has been relatively muted in the last several months with the exception of the acquisition of Victorian provider Elements Childcare and Early Learning Centre by Busy Bees Australia in April 2022 and more recently Evolve Education’s disposal of its New Zealand network to ex Affinity Education owners, private equity group Anchorage Capital. 

The AFR noted that Miles Advisory is currently seeking expressions of interest in Story House and with hopes that a deal will be signed by Christmas.

Access the original coverage of this story here.