Our Merger & Acquisition Process

After the initial consultation, you will decide to act, or not. Acting involves engaging us to represent your interests and to find the right parties for your business. You will dictate what’s important to you. Pure financial gain? Continuity of the business you’ve built? The welfare of loyal staff? Retirement and a new life? It is rarely a straight-forward decision but we will construct the parameters and documentation and advise what is likely to be possible, or what may cause a constraint on a deal.

The Engagement stage is where the documentation is signed and we both agree to move forwards to the detailed preparation stage.

The Preparation stage is perhaps the most important as it is where we discreetly delve deep into your business and extract all the key points that are going to backup our valuation expectations. Once we feel we have all the information we need, we then prepare the documentation – the business summary and the full information memorandum, in readiness for delivery to potential acquirers. This documentation is the most critical information the buyer will use when assessing viability for acquisition so we believe they have to be amazing. We don’t just input figures and pictures into a standard template like everyone else, we take pride in presenting fa stylish suite of first-class information that also stands up to extreme buyer scrutiny.

Whilst the documentation is being prepared, we work behind the scenes to establish a profile of potential buyers. We will use our existing database of contacts and call upon all of our collective knowledge and experience to generate two target lists. The first list will be between 5 – 10 targets which we believe are most likely to be interested. The second list will be all of the targets we have found in excess of list one which will be contacted should the first list prove unsuccessful.

Once a number of offers have been received and we are happy that the negotiations have achieved the desired outcome, we move to the preparation of detailed heads of terms and offer/acceptance documentation. We believe in spending a fair amount of time preparing and negotiating heads in as much detail as possible in order to reduce the extra time taken and therefore legal fees during the final SPA completion process.

We have a huge amount of experience with due diligence and hence we prefer to go through DD checklists and prepare a fully loaded online data room in advance of the buyer’s requests for information. That way we present a professional, high integrity proposition and it takes the frontline stress away from the vendors.

Up to and including completion, we stand side by side with business owners and advise, assist and liaise with legal teams, vendors and purchasers to ensure a timely, stress-free and efficient transaction.