Buying a Business

American data-scientist, author and New York Times' op-ed contributor Seth Stephens-Davidowitz just came out with his latest book Don't Trust Your Gut (Harper Collins, May 2022). Subtitled "Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life," Stephens-Davidowitz pours through scholarly research on dating profiles, tax records, career trajectories and other massive troves of data to answer the age-old question: What Makes Us Happy? Stephens-Davidowitz answers are surprising and counter-intuitive. Relevant to buying and selling businesses...

Franchises are popular choice among budding entrepreneurs for a variety of reasons. Established franchises even more so. The reasons behind their appeal are numerous. Name RecognitionTopping the list is the ability to take advantage of the name recognition of brand that is already out there, known and trusted in the community. Take home healthcare, for instance. How comfortable would a prospective customer feel entrusting the care of their mother to a start-up agency without much...

Can you make money and follow your dreams? Yes! A recent article at Entrepreneur posits a framework for deciding if you might be able to turn your hobby into a business. The piece (very reasonably) revolves around the potential for monetization. "Even if you’re pursuing this mostly because of your passion," writes SEO.co CRO Timothy Carter, "you’ll still need a stream of income to offset your costs and keep the business running." Uncontroversial! Carter suggests the following...

The buyer-seller meeting is quite often a “make or break” meeting.  Your business broker or M&A Advisor will do everything possible to ensure that this meeting goes as well as possible.  It is vitally important to realize that rarely is there an offer before buyers and sellers actually meet.  The all-important offer usually comes directly after this all-important meeting.  As a result, you want to ensure that meetings are as positive and productive as possible. Buyers need...

Sellers generally desire all-cash transactions; however, oftentimes partial seller financing is necessary in typical middle market company transactions.  Furthermore, sellers who demand all-cash deals typically receive a lower purchase price than they would have if the deal were structured differently. Although buyers may be able to pay all-cash at closing, they often want to structure a deal where the seller has left some portion of the price on the table, either in the form of a...