Maximizing Value – Strategic Exits Blog
Category: Maximizing Value
How to Select the Best M&A Advisor to Sell Your Company
From "How to Finish Big – Tactics to Maximize Your Selling Price." This was a short workshop at the Business Transitions Forum in Vancouver, BC November 26, 2015. Key points: There is almost nothing written about selecting M&A advisors How much work is required to sell a company well? For a fully marketed, competitive transaction it's about 1 to 2 man-years If a ver...	
How Much Will Your Company Sell For?
– Understanding the Valuation Process
Keynote from the Business Transitions Forum in Vancouver, BC. Learn how to determine the price you'll receive when you sell your company and what you can do to ensure the price is fair. This talk describes the market factors which affect the price and describes what you can do to maximize the final valuation. Highlights from How Much Will Your Company Sell For? About half of the peo...	
July 9, 2015 | no responses	
This was a talk to several hundred M&A professionals at the Association of Mergers & Acquisitions Advisors annual conference. The organizers asked me to discuss ways to increase the final selling price and gave me this title to work with. Key Points: The first step: Hire a really good M&A Advisor - seriously Isn’t going “from 3x to 7x” the main reason to hire an M&A Advisor? ...	
Selling a Business for 50% More – Case Studies
Most people have difficulty believing that you can sell a business for 50% more just by executing the exit well. I've written before about how this can be achieved. This post has video excerpts where you'll see CEOs and Chairs who have actually done it. It is very unusual to hear case studies ...	
I’m not sure I should be typing this. It’s something I hate to admit about myself. But the reality is all investors are subject to the same psychological imperfections. It doesn’t matter whether they are grannies buying ten shares of Google, or hotshot CEO’s acquiring billion dollar companies, none of us are so perfect that we are not susceptible to a great sales pitch. This is a really important consideration when selecting an M&A advi...	
The effect of strategy on exit valuation is one of the most challenging concepts for investors and entrepreneurs to intuitively understand. I didn’t ‘get it’ until I was fifty. It’s not that I am slow to learn, it’s just that, like a lot of things in life, it takes a few dozen experiences before the lessons really sink in. When those experiences are about selling a business and each data point can take a year, it can take decades to accumula...	
Selling a Business and Inefficient Markets
January 1, 2010 | one response	
The market for selling a business is very ‘inefficient’. This is one of the reasons a well designed and executed exit can easily increase the business valuation by 50% or more. The best way to illustrate this is with a counter example - the residential real estate market. M...	
Public Company Acquisitions Can Increase Business Value
November 1, 2009 | no responses	
The public markets provide much better data to illustrate the 50+% increase in business valuation that can be realized when you sell a business. This increase in value is much more familiar to public market investors, in part because the increase in price is so easy to see. In the public market vernacular this is usually referred to as the control p...	
October 1, 2009 | one response	
Companies are sold not bought Many entrepreneurs think that when their company is ready to be acquired, a buyer will knock on their door and make an offer. This does happen, but less often than someone knocking on the door of your house asking to buy it. Even if an unsolicited offer does come in, boards should almost never approve a company sale when there is only one bidder because the price will almost certainly be too low. Even if the buy...	
Illuminating Strategic Value When You Sell a Business
Another reason a well designed and executed exit strategy can increase the business valuation by 50% or more when you sell a business is the ‘strategic value’. The only reason any company buys another company is because they believe: they can increase the value of ...	