“Buying  selling a business, understand why you’re doing it first.” Dan Roth

Dan co-founded a mergers and acquisitions firm, built and sold several software technology firms, was a senior executive for a fortune 500 company responsible for an online e-commerce and a catalog business which sold more than 10,000 products. He currently is the Managing Director of IBG Business in Denver, Colorado. Dan reveals key insights that owners and buyers need to know if they are selling or buying a business today.

Takeaways

• Have a game plan, think about how adding a business that you’re going acquire is going fit in with your company or, from a seller’s perspective, decide whether this is the right time to sell.
• What are you going do after you sell the business?
• Have you thoughtfully put forth your wealth planning so that when you get the money from the sale of the business that you’ll know how to manage your assets so you could live the life that you deserve?
• Understand the factors relating to both the buy side and the sell side when you’re thinking about different types of transactions.
• Things that we advise clients to consider early in the process, well before they actually sell the company.
  • “Am I on the right path?
  • Am I doing the right things in my company to drive value so I can have an exit down the road that is going be at the level I need it to be?
  • Am I properly creating the management team that will make me attractive to buyers?
  • Do I understand what makes value components drive in my business? Am I positioning my company so that I have backlog in the future, because buyers like to see a backlog?
  • Can I put contracts in place?”
• From seven traits of successful people; start with the end in mind, start with the exit in mind.
• I like to share with business owners this context, which is for pretty much every business owner I’ve ever helped or consulted with, the sale of their company will end up being the single largest financial transaction of their life.
• Worst part of my entrepreneurial career was buying businesses I never should have bought and then compounding it by having the business burn down in a fire and pretty much losing everything.
• If a buyer approaches you out of the blue, be very careful. Step back, make sure that you get some advisors around you right away to coach you through the process.
• From a buyer’s perspective, if I can I get you to negotiate and share information with me when you’re not really prepared and you really don’t have good advisors around you, that’s a dream for me. That’s about as good as it can get if I’m trying to bottom fish and pay you a lot less than you’re really worth.
• If you know you need to sell at some point in the future and, right now, you have 60% or 70% of your revenue coming from a single client, your game plan and your strategy must be, over the next number of years, to reduce that client’s portion of your revenue down to 10% or 15%, or you’re going to have a significant valuation hit when you go to sell that company.

For more articles and content about how to sell a company go to www.ibgbusiness.com