Transaction advisory

Selling a company tends to be a long process that takes a couple of months. In practice, it starts much earlier than the actual negotiations with the buyer. That is when the business owner can make mistakes that will cost them dearly. What are these traps and how can they be avoided?

If the seller wants to land a good price and the buyer wants to avoid overpaying, the transaction of selling a business must be supported with a reliable valuation of the acquired company. But who should do it and how should it be done in order for the valuation report to be credible?

If you are thinking about selling your business, sooner or later you will have to handle what is a crucial thing for this process, namely attract the right buyer to your business offer.

Completion Accounts is one of the two mechanisms (the other being the Locked Box) used to determine the final price in the process of closing M&A transactions. In this model, the final acquisition price is determined only on the basis of the balance sheet of the target entity prepared as at the date of signing the final contract that transfers the ownership from the Seller to the Buyer. However, the practice shows that preparing such data for the said date is actually impossible, and the process of obtaining and processing it can take weeks or even months after the Share Purchase Agreement has been concluded. So how does it work?

Locked box is a formula for closing M&A transactions that is proving increasingly popular in recent years and tends to replace completion accounts. What is essential for the locked box arrangement is that the transaction price is determined on the basis of the historical balance sheet at a pre-signing date and is not then subject to any post-completion adjustment.

More and more family businesses are facing a dilemma - whether to pass on the legacy to the next generation or rather to financially secure the existing owners? From the point of view of the owner of a family business, often the only correct decision concerning the future of the developed assets is to sell the company.

The M&A transaction market is subject to business cycles. As it depends on the current situation of a business, there may be some ups and downs. Recently, due to the SARS-COV-2 pandemic and the emerging global economic crisis, company owners who planned to sell their businesses are now beginning to question the idea: does it make sense to sell a business at the time of a crisis?

Basically, the place where documents are made available by the seller to the auditor for inspection is the so-called data room. There are two ways to share information in order to carry out due diligence...

It is not my purpose to enumerate the financial benefits of the due diligence process during negotiations, because this was discussed in the article "Due diligence − a service worth millions", but I want to point out the risk that is associated with too much confidence in yourself and your infallibility.

At a certain stage of life of a company the owners may be considering its selling off. This may be due to a difficult market situation, synergies stemming from the merger with another entity, the age of the owners or their new plans for the future and the many diverse factors. Not every company, however, is in the position to be taken over. Well, maybe this is too strong a statement – any company is capable of being acquired, however, the price is not always attractive to the seller. Often one can hear about companies being bought “for a dime” and it does not always apply to companies in debt. Why is it that some companies change their owners under good conditions and others are never taken over?