Exits are the most rewarding stage of your company's growth journey, in more ways than one. The planning process for your exit starts at the very earliest stages, and will continue if you take on third party investment, as you seek to demonstrate to potential backers that there is a realistic prospect of a lucrative exit in reward for the faith required of them.
When you do come to start a more proactive marketing and sale process, it is critical that you have a good understanding of how your potential buyer will approach its decision making process. You should be looking to put yourself in their shoes so you can pre-empt any concerns they may have, and tailor your approach to negotiations to ensure that you get the best deal.
A key differential, if a broad one, is that some buyers will be trade buyers and some will be institutional investors who will be buying your company as a financial investment.
Trade Buyers can offer a great fit
- The classic trade buyer is a company which is looking to make acquisitions in its own industry. Commonly, trade buyers are motivated by the prospect of synergies which can give rise to economies of scale. However, synergies can extend to other strategic objectives, including the need to enter new marketplaces, the need to grow market share and other subtler synergies such as complimentary intellectual property. These tend to be longer term goals than those of purely financial buyers.
- Trade buyers will often have a deep practical knowledge of your business, arising from its own activities. This means that they may place less of an emphasis on retaining and incentivising an existing management team. Trade buyers will also make thorough plans for integrating your business into an existing outfit.
- From a valuation perspective, the trade buyer will need to get comfortable that their agreed valuation reflects the value of identified synergies less integration costs. Their diligence will tend to reflect this.
- If your most likely exit route will be to a trade buyer, you should focus in your planning on how you can make their deal easier. You need to show them how your business can be transplanted as seamlessly as possible into theirs - shared culture, functional systems and management, and a dovetailing between your strengths and their weaknesses.
Financial Buyers can offer great firepower
- Financial buyers will need to see growth potential in your business as it stands. They will also generally be attracted to targets with the strong annuity revenues required to support leveraged finance and where they have a good prospect of a short to medium term profitable divestment. If it essentially an MBO deal or variant which is proposed, then there will be a strong focus on the management team of their target. Unsurprisingly then, a financial buyer will focus much of its diligence on revenues and on management.
- Increasingly, private equity houses are able to finance their deals from more sophisticated funding products on a global basis via multiple sources. By contrast, trade buyers without the benefit of a cash war chest for acquisitions may find it much harder to access finance for their acquisitions.
- In recent years, trade buyers have powered the M&A market in the wake of private equity retrenchment since 2009 in the aftermath of the credit crunch . However, PE is well and truly back on the scene. It is likely that PE buyers will take back their place at the head of the M&A market: as confidence amongst institutional investors continues to grow and the availability of finance continues to improve, trade buyers will struggle to match PE valuations.
- If your most likely exit route will be a private equity buyer, you need to show strong cashflows, long term contracts with the "stickiness" necessary to underpin revenue forecasts. You should also consider how to help them plan their own exit - what are the areas for organic growth? Your PE buyer will need to see something left for them in terms of hot future prospects for the business.
Hybrid buyers can offer fit plus firepower
- Increasingly we are seeing buyers who are part-trade, part-financial entering the market. Essentially, these buyers are pursuing variants of the "buy and build" model. Activity amongst hybrid buyers is a particularly noticeable trend in capital-intensive sectors where PE players can see a case for investing in economies of scale synergies. There are more and more PE-backed investors who are specialising in this approach and targeting highly focused niches.
- Hybrid buyers will often seek to make acquisitions on the strength of their own balance sheet. However, you should be aware that some hybrid buyers will be negotiating with their own financiers concurrently with closing the deal with you. In these circumstances, it is especially important that timetables are adhered to such that your buyer can in turn progress its own financing transaction.
- Hybrid buyers are particularly noticeable in certain IT sub-sectors at present. However, it would be no surprise to see this trend on the increase in other capital-intensive sectors, such as cleantech and biotech.
