Our initial conversations with you will focus on more than just understanding the numbers. We first want to understand you—your goals, your reasons for thinking about a sale, and your expectations for the deal process.
Building a partnership
When it comes time to talk about your company, we want to know more than just the financials. We also want to appreciate the legacy and the team you have built. Small business isn’t easy—we want to know what made you and your business successful when others weren’t.
More than anything, we will lay the foundation for a strong working relationship built on honesty, integrity, and respect. We engage in only friendly transactions, with owners who see things in terms of “we first.”
Due Diligence
Owners entrusting us with their legacy deserve helpful teammates. Our diligence process is professional, responsive, and tailored.
Most small businesses go through a sale only once, if ever. That means that both buyers and sellers are often encountering a new process when it comes to the diligence stage of deal-making.
Often this takes longer than you’d expect! Still, we believe this should be a collaborative effort, where we work alongside you to learn more about the fundamentals of your business. No “gotcha” questions from us.
As soon as we have made you an offer, we will immediately begin working with you to forecast the information, documents, and connections needed to bring the deal to closing. Together, we will set an aggressive timeline and complete a thorough list of tasks.
Throughout it all, we promise to keep an open line of communication on where we are in the process and how we can keep the ball moving. After all, diligence moves at the speed of our relationship with you, the owner.
Everything we learn during diligence will be reflected in a legal agreement—a document called the Purchase Agreement.
Closing
The day we’ve been working toward finally arrives! At Closing, you will officially transfer ownership of your business to us, though your legacy will continue long afterwards. We’ll see to it.
Our commitment is to “do no harm” to the business and the team. Other buyers might try to storm in, change everything, and disrupt the system you’ve spent years putting in place. We take a different view. That means we will spend the early days, weeks, and months learning about the day-to-day operations of the business.
Unfortunately, some buyers act more like marauders, squeezing every ounce of value out of a deal and leaving the business to starve.
We are different. We will act as stewards of the business and the team and community that it serves. That’s the work we think a business like yours exists to do, and that’s the work we love doing.
