After 20+ years of building your company, you’ve decided to move on to the next phase of your life. For some that may be traveling with your significant other, spending more time with the grandkids, or immersing yourself in new hobbies. Your exit strategy needs to fund the remaining years of your life, so you want ensure you are getting the money you need to fully retire. As you decide to sell your company, you consider the options of selling it on your own vs hiring an advisory firm. You wonder how working with a firm will make a difference in your transaction.
I’ve already received unsolicited offers. If I already have interest, why do I need a firm to support my transaction?
Sure, you can sell to the competitor who reached out to you last year but how do you know you’re getting the most value for your company? Or that they are the best buyer?
Will you wake up a week after closing with a pile of “what if’s”? What if I pursued other buyer opportunities? Would another buyer have paid more for my company? What if I would have had the support of someone who knows how transactions work?
There are significant risks to selling your company alone.A quality, experienced M&A advisor has relationships with hundreds of buyers, both financial and strategic. They can bring in multiple buyers to help you get the best price and terms. This way you don’t have to settle for the offer from the guy down the road. (P.S. The guy down the road doesn’t want you to use an M&A firm. They want you to sell to them so they don’t have to compete with other offers and buyers who might bring more to the table – more synergies, more money, more relationships.)
At the end of the day, you still have a business to run. Can you manage a full 6-12 month transaction process and keep your business running without a hiccup? The last thing you want is to spend too much of your time focused on the buyer where your business falls off. That is a sure way to scare away the buyer.
Have a full deal team working on your behalf running your process – a team who has closed many transactions and can help things get back on track when they go sideways. (And they always go sideways somewhere along the way!)
An M&A advisor brings confidence, wisdom and capability to bring you the best price while driving the process from start to close.
Question: Do you know of a company that sold without an advisor’s assistance? Did they have a poor or positive experience?
**Come back for next month's post and we'll talk about the ways an advisor can add-value when you want to BUY a company.**