Acquisition

A NOTE BEFORE YOU BEGIN There is a particular kind of conversation that happens between founders and the people who quietly watch their businesses for a living, in which the founder explains at length how the business has matured beyond its dependence on them, how the team operates with full autonomy, how their role has become more strategic and less operational, how the structures and systems have all been carefully built to ensure continuity. The person listening nods polit

How to find the businesses that have not yet decided to sell. The visible acquisition market is the market most acquirers spend their professional lives competing in, which is the first commercial mistake most acquirers make without ever quite recognising it as one. The visible market is composed of businesses that have engaged advisors, instructed brokers, prepared information memoranda, and announced themselves to a curated list of potential buyers through the standard chan

What founders see in their own business that buyers never will. Almost every founder I have ever sat with describes their business through the language of what it could become. This is not a flaw, it is the disposition that built the business in the first place, because nobody constructs a company from nothing without an unusually robust ability to see what is not yet there, and nobody sustains the effort of running one without a similar capacity to keep believing in the ver