If your buyer is backed by private equity, there is a growing chance you are not being acquired as a new platform. You are being acquired as an add-on to one the firm already owns. That single fact changes what the offer on the table actually means. Add-on acquisitions have quietly become the dominant way…
Signing the letter of intent feels like crossing the finish line. It is not. It is the starting gun. And the scrutiny waiting on the other side is heavier than ever. A study from Bayes Business School and SS&C Intralinks looked at more than 900 global deals and found that average pre-announcement due diligence has…
A headline this week declared that mid market deal activity continues to plummet. It is a strong word. Then you read the numbers underneath it and a different picture appears. Through the first five months of this year the total value of these deals is up. The average deal size is up. The thing that…
The dollar figure that decides whether your sale triggers a mandatory federal antitrust review just went up. As of mid February it sits at 133.9 million dollars in transaction value. Plenty of mid sized deals fall below that line. If yours is one of them you might assume the regulators are not part of your…
I used to be a pretty good pitcher. Then one season I joined a new team. I showed up thinking I would be on the mound. The coach had other plans. His son was a pitcher, and from the first practice I was told in a hundred small ways that I was not good enough.…
A new report from Axial, a private deal network covering the lower middle market, breaks down the most common reasons signed letters of intent failed to close on its platform in 2025. The leading cause was not financing. It was not the seller getting cold feet. It was diligence findings that surfaced after the LOI…
The data point that should stop every family business owner cold is this one. Of the executives surveyed by Deloitte who admit their succession planning is behind schedule, 62 percent gave the same reason. Succession was not a critical priority for the business right now. They knew it was coming. They knew it mattered. They…
Robert was recently featured on Fit Small Business, offering expert advice on successfully setting the rules for a fair office lottery pool. Read the full article here: 21 Innovative Ideas for Fun Office Pools
To retain key employees, make their jobs too good to leave. Arrange “golden handcuffs” agreements with key managers to reward loyalty and promote retention. A golden handcuffs strategy can make a management position so attractive that it would be financially irresponsible to walk away. The classic golden handcuffs arrangement is a “top hat” program –…
Business owners are builders. They spend their lives building firms to provide goods and services to their clients, and those firms provide them with a living. But nothing can tear down that lifetime of work faster than the death of a business owner, or the death of a business partner. Often, much of the value…