After an IPO, the various divisions often will need to be spun off as separate entities, even though they looked very attractive on paper being together. When organizations end up owning a vast strata of business through acquisition, they may appear solid on paper, but something of their corporate soul has often been lost and the organization often begins to falter as the disparate groups are often unable to adopt a single corporate culture. It will only be a matter of time before they too get bought out or even squeezed out. What is left is a few other marginal players left to try to take on the size and might of EBG, but mostly without success. EBG’s seemingly endless company acquisitions has left the employee benefit market with very few independent players and the once healthy level playing field has now all but disappeared. In the one particular case of, after buying them in 2015, EBG essentially threw all their dated technology and infrastructure in the garbage and ultimately just purchased the company for their client list, which is a very expensive way to grow an organization quickly and does not make friends of the employees who are now out of work. With most of the growth coming through acquisition and very little of it through their own innovation, EBG faces internal problems of bringing such disparate groups together in the long term. This sets up the company for an obvious and anticipated IPO, as they already own most of the genre and can show huge market ownership that impresses Wall Street analysts that see very little beyond the balance sheet and P/L account. The privately held EBG organization appears to now have huge amounts of investment capital on hand to be able to acquire such a huge number of competitors in such a small amount of time. Very little of the organization's growth has been through its own organic growth of its existing brands and its flagship employee discount service is a great example of that, which has increased in size by over 500% in just the last five years. The financial investments from a number of silent partners and from public partners like Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and the Shubert Organization, have allowed the organization to go on a corporate buying spree that has never been seen before in this industry. The size of Entertainment Benefits Group, and its flagship service 'Tickets At Work', has grown exponentially in recent years, but most of the growth has been through a huge number of acquisitions and a few mergers thrown in for good measure.
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