Built to Sell: A Roadmap for Middle
Market Owners - A Note from Dave
Mead — Mead Consulting Group
[Editor’s Note: After more than 35 years advising
middle market owners through some of the most important decisions of their
lives, I have sat across the table from hundreds of sellers. I have watched
transactions close beautifully — and I have watched them fall apart. I have
seen owners walk away with generational wealth and others leave millions on the
table through no fault but timing and preparation. What separates them is
rarely luck. It is almost always what they did — or didn't do — in the years
before the process began. -dpm]
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I Wish I Had Known How Early "Early" Really Is
Every owner I have ever worked with believed they had
more time than they did. The strategies that genuinely move the needle on value
— tax structures, financial cleanup, owner dependency reduction, customer
diversification — all require runway. Not weeks. Years. The owners who started
three or more years out executed them fully. The ones who started six months out
executed almost none of them.
If I could go back and give one piece of advice to
every owner I have worked with, it would be this: the moment you begin to think
seriously about selling — even casually, even abstractly — is the moment to
pick up the phone. Not because the sale is imminent. Because the preparation
is.
I Wish I Had Known That the Sale Price Is Not the Number That Matters
For most of my career I watched owners fixate on the
headline number — the enterprise value, the multiple, the top-line figure that
gets announced at the closing dinner. What they often didn't focus on until it
was too late was what they actually kept. Federal and state taxes, deal
structure, the working capital peg, escrow holdbacks, earnout risk — by the
time all of it is accounted for, the distance between gross proceeds and net
proceeds can be staggering.
The owners who fared best were the ones who engaged a
transaction tax advisor early — not their regular CPA, but a specialist who
lives in this space — and built a structure designed to protect what they had
earned. That work cannot happen at closing. It has to happen years before it.
I Wish I Had Known How Personal It Would Feel
A business sale looks like a financial transaction on
paper. In practice, it is one of the most emotionally charged events an owner
will ever navigate. The business you built is not just an asset — it is your
identity, your daily structure, your professional relationships, and often your
deepest sense of purpose. When it transfers to someone else, the absence of all
of that can hit in ways that the wire transfer does not fill.
I have seen owners who were fully prepared financially
arrive at the other side of a transaction completely unprepared for what came
next. The ones who navigated it best had thought carefully — before the deal
closed — about what the next chapter would look like. They had a plan for their
time, their energy, and their identity that did not depend on the business they
had just sold.
I Wish I Had Known to Trust the Process — and the Team
There is a moment in nearly every transaction where the
seller wants to take control — to reach out to the buyer directly, to
short-circuit the banker's process, to make a handshake deal that feels cleaner
than the formal one. I understand the impulse. I have also watched it cost
sellers dearly.
The structured, competitive process your investment
banker runs exists for one reason: to maximize your outcome. Every shortcut
around it reduces competitive tension and hands leverage to the buyer. The
right team, running the right process, with the seller focused on keeping the
business performing — that combination produces the best results. Every time.
The Conversation I Wish More Owners Had Sooner
The owners I have seen thrive — financially,
emotionally, and in the chapter that followed — shared one thing in common.
They started the conversation early. Not when the pressure was on, not when
health or circumstance forced their hand, but when they still had time to do
the work properly.
If any part of this series resonates with you, that
conversation is the right next step. It costs nothing and changes everything.
Contact Dave Mead at (303) 660-8135 or
meaddp@meadconsultinggroup.com. The conversation is free. The cost of waiting
is not.
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