Get acquired

Pre-Sale Planning

Preparation is key to a successful sale. We advise our clients to start early, ensuring all housekeeping matters are in order – from reviewing customer and employee contracts to strengthening IP protection, resolving disputes, and formalising informal agreements. Governance, compliance, and tax matters across all jurisdictions should be up to date, while financials, management accounts, and forecasts must be well-organised and reliable. Optimising key fundamentals like recurring revenue, profitability, and growth will ultimately maximise valuation

Appoint Advisers

Choose corporate finance and legal advisers with proven expertise, commitment, and chemistry. You’ll work closely with them for months, so ensure they align with your goals.

Prepare Confidential Information Memorandum

Once appointed as your adviser, we will create a compelling yet realistic Confidential Information Memorandum (CIM) to attract buyers, balancing optimism with critical business details. The CIM needs to contain enough information to allow a buyer/s to make an indicative offer for the business.

Identify Buyers

Leveraging our extensive global network and deep market research, we identify the most relevant strategic and private equity buyers – those willing to pay a premium for synergies, market expansion, or unique capabilities.

The Approach

We discreetly introduce the opportunity to potential buyers with a punchy Executive Summary (teaser). Only after signing an NDA do they gain access to the full CIM.

Meetings

We manage the buyer meetings, ensuring senior management presents effectively while maintaining confidentiality to avoid disruption. Selling a business is a significant distraction and it essential the business continues to perform during the process.

Offers & Negotiations

We set strict deadlines to drive competitive bidding and ensure offers include details on price, deal structure, funding, due diligence scope, leadership, key personnel and post integration plans. This is a critical phase of the negotiation process where competitive leverage can drive up the price and likewise where further value can be won (and lost) if the nuances of the negotiation are correctly (or incorrectly) interpreted – this is where deal experience counts.

Heads of Terms

We refine bids and negotiate terms to secure the best outcome. The highest offer isn’t always the best; structure, cultural fit, and execution certainty are equally critical. Once agreed, control shifts toward the buyer, making this stage pivotal to ensure ambiguity is teased out of any bids before heading into the next phase which typically results in exclusivity being granted to the winning bidder.

Due Diligence (DD)

We manage the due diligence process, coordinating financial, tax, legal, and commercial reviews while ensuring transparency and mitigating risks that could derail the deal. An essential element of due diligence is the Virtual Data Room (VDR), which must be meticulously organised and structured. It should provide buyers’ due diligence teams with all the necessary information to verify and substantiate the business as presented in the Confidential Information Memorandum (CIM) and management presentations.

Legal Documentation

Your legal team will negotiate the Sale & Purchase Agreement (SPA), warranties, and indemnities to protect your interests. We work closely with your legal team throughout the deal process.

Completion

Maintaining deal momentum is crucial for driving competitive tension and keeping a transaction on track. We run a robust process and this is never more important than in the final stages of a deal to get all parties through to signing and the deal done.

While the signing happens digitally, we make sure our clients are ready to celebrate their success—and then shift focus to the next chapter.