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Business owners who want to sell often think they can “just lace up their hiking boots, put on their backpack and shoot to the top of Mt. Everest.” In doing so they also want the highest valuation and the quickest close. The owner is convinced that the one or two interested buyers who have expressed an interest will pay top price for a quick deal.

Business owners want to sell their business and not have to look back or worry about past liabilities. Buyers want to make sure they are not acquiring unknown liabilities. This tension may be resolved through the purchase of representation and warranty insurance. Buyers are the ones who generally purchase this type of insurance (80%) versus Sellers (20%).

A successful business owner will oftentimes get phone calls from parties who are interested in acquiring their business. If the business is large enough (over $5M EBITDA) these calls will be fairly frequent and include a large number of calls from investment bankers who represent that “they have the buyer for you.” Owners then call me and want to meet to discuss a possible sale. That buyer may be a competitor, customer or supplier the seller has known for many years and/or has been in discussions to buy the business for a long period of time. The stage is set [...]

Are you 85 years old and have 77 marathons under your belt?  You guessed it.  Larry is 85 and has run 77 marathons all around the world in addition to a number of triathlons.  I met Larry as a locker “neighbor” at the gym.  He was a nice, very unassuming guy and, like the rest of us, just trying to gear up for another day at the gym.

Business owners want to sell their business and not have to look back or worry about past liabilities. Buyers want to make sure they are not acquiring unknown liabilities. This tension may be resolved through the purchase of representation and warranty insurance. Buyers are the ones who generally purchase this type of insurance (80%) versus Sellers (20%).

Selling a business that you have owned for several decades or that has been in the family for several generations can produce some pretty strong emotions. Generally those emotions will run the whole gamut from “couldn’t be happier to get rid of all the headaches” to “why did I ever think of giving up something I have worked so hard to build and has been so good to me and my employees.” After recently closing a successful sale transaction, my client said he understood why I had told him, on several occasions, that selling a business is a “process” and [...]

Process means everything. Selling a business is a “process” and not an “event”. We walk you, through the process. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to more effectively make decisions that will aid in the successful sale of your business. The M&A Law Firm was established in 1982 and is the only law firm in the Country that focuses primarily on representing sellers of middle market companies ($10M to $200M). All aspects of the business sale are expertly integrated in order to make sure that each step is carried out in the best manner possible. You become educated [...]

Football, Trickle Down Economics and When is the Right Time To Sell Your Business? It often times takes more than just reading “between the lines” to get to the truth. We process information in order to make decisions. Having information, however, is not the same as having the facts or the truth. Here are two examples from recent news articles. First, the news media is replete with articles dealing with NFL player suicides. Those articles site “as fact” that the suicide rate of NFL players is 6 times the national average. That statistic, however, was derived from a totally unsupported [...]

How Social Security and Medicare "Means Testing" Affects Mergers and Acquisitions After recently hearing the comments by Ken Langone, one of the founders of Home Depot, regarding “means testing,” I thought it would be timely to update my previous email newsletter on “means testing” and send it out again. Consider the following scenario. Fred spends $100 per week on various unhealthy habits, never works any overtime and doesn’t hesitate to use a charge card for numerous impulse expenditures. John avoids expenditures for unhealthy items, earns, on average, $150 per week in overtime pay and is very careful to only buy [...]

CAUTION!! A MANAGEMENT BUYOUT MAY NOT BE THE WAY TO SELL YOUR COMPANY You own your business and have been agonizing over having to go through a marketing and sale process and then not knowing what will happen to your employees.  Then, what you believe to be the perfect solution appears right inside of your organization.  A key manager or group of managers has approached you with the proposition of buying the business.  The discussion then centers on how you can avoid having to take the company to market and how management’s purchase will provide certainty for the ongoing employment [...]