Buying a business?

Selling a business?

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Advice on Buying or Selling a Business

We provide general advice on all matters to do with buying and selling businesses. Here are a few examples:

Assessment and Valuation.

Is your business saleable, and if so for what value?

Management Advice can provide an assessment and valuation, based upon a structured interview process and using your accounts. This report helps you understand what is attractive to an acquirer and can form the basis of a strategic plan to improve the desirability of the business and increase its value. We employ a comprehensive range of valuation techniques. Read more here

Strategic Planning

Successful Acquisitions start with the plan. What are your strengths and weaknesses and what should we be looking for in an acquisition? What does the perfect business look like, and what are the no-go areas? We can help with an external, objective assessment not only of your business and its characteristics but we can apply that same knowledge to investigate potential targets.

Negotiation

We're often asked to help our clients respond to opportunistic approaches on either the buy-side or the sell side. A recent project has involved managing the friendly merger of two software companies.

Raising finance
Management Advice has access to all forms of finance and financial advice - banks, business angel private finance, private recovery finance etc etc. We can advice on the most suitable form of finance and arrange introductions to relevant providers.

Planning for and project managing the post-merger integration
Whether an acquisition achieves its strategic objectives or not depends largely on the manner in which the acquisition is integrated. Planning for this has to start well before the deal is finalized and is (or should be) a very significant drain on management resources. Management Advice has developed a structured approach to this vital part of the acquisition process and can provide the extra resource to carry this through.

Managing the people side of the project during a merger
The people side of any M & A project is vital. Figures from the large corporate M & A industry in the USA indicate that:

• up to 45% of senior managers in an acquired business leave within 12 months of being acquired;
• productivity can drop by up to 40% in the first 3 months after an acquisition.

Timely communication, TUPE and HR legalities, and above all, answering the "me" issues (what's happening to my pay / car / office / pension etc) is critical in those first few weeks.