Sell Side Advisory

Personal reasons often dictate the timing more than business opportunism. A good business will nearly always be in demand.

When you're ready, and ideally when the business is too. If you're already fielding inbound interest or have a firm timeline, we can start right away. If an exit is still years off, Strategic Advisory gets you prepared, so you can smoothly transition into the process when the timing is right for you personally.

We hold high internal confidentiality standards. We sign a unilateral confidentiality agreement at the start of our engagement, protecting your interests. Information is never provided to 3rd party advisors without your prior approval.

A secure data room portal is provided for you to upload company documents. The data room is later used to provide documents to the buy-side parties as well.

The initial marketing materials are provided to prospective parties completely anonymized, so you company cannot be identified.

Only once the NDA is signed are parties allowed access to the secure data room, which contains the information needed to evaluate the opportunity. Subsequent details of your business will only be shared on an as-needed basis to buyers who demonstrate a sufficient degree of serious interest.

The time requirements vary widely in different phases of the process. Owners are always central to the transaction, but there will be stretches of time where you have little to do and others that are more intensive.

We take the administrative weight off your shoulders, including data room preparation, marketing material development, diligence requests and document review. As part of this, we gather as much information from you upfront so you only have to answer questions once, rather than a dozen times.

We also handle the buyer communications and Q&A. Finally, we take point in handling the coordination between all the parties of your deal team as well as serve as the bridge of communication with the buy-side’s deal team.

That’s a term that is negotiated during the process. It is typically that owners stay involved for 6-12 months for post-closing transition and operational succession planning. There are other structures that incentivize the owner to stay engaged even longer, but are optional and must be a good fit for the client in order to be pursued.

That's a good position to be in, and a great time for us to jump in. The buyer who approached you may well be the right one. But an offer isn't a closed deal, and most of the risk sits in the months between the two. As a trusted advisor, we will help steer around potential pitfalls before they become big headaches.

Here's where we help:

Know the offer is real. We can evaluate that the buyer is serious and has the capacity to close as well as identify if there’s any problems lurking in the offer structure.

Know it's the best available. A buyer who's alone at the table has little reason to put their best number forward. When they know you have other options and an experienced advisor beside you, they tend to bid more fully and move with more urgency. We perform a thorough Company Valuation and also quietly test the market, since the best fit is often not the one who called first.

Get it to the finish line. We ensure your company is presented accurately up front, so diligence confirms your story instead of rewriting it. Then we keep the momentum going, so a small issue doesn't turn into a price cut or a stalled deal.

The majority of our sell-side advisory fee is success-based, aligning our incentives with successful outcomes. A modest engagement retainer, credited to the success fee at closing, confirms mutual commitment from the start. This is a partnership model that is rooted in our conviction that the best business relationships are those in which everyone does well together.