Mandate 03 · Sell-side
Succession
Acting for an owner-operator through a transfer, on the terms that decide it rather than on price alone.
The position
An owner in their sixties running a business they started is holding an asset that represents most of their wealth, their working life, and their standing in a town where people know what they built. The decision to transfer it is taken under conditions that have little to do with the multiple environment.
Price is one term. Beside it sit the name over the door, the people who have been there twenty years, whether the site stays open, and what the owner does on the Monday after close. Buyers who treat those as soft terms lose transactions to buyers who treat them as terms.
How it runs
We are engaged while the decision is still being considered, which is the period in which an owner will talk and has not yet retained anyone. The terms that matter are established first, in the owner's words, and the buyer universe is built against all of them.
The process that follows is short and it is run to a shortlist. A document sent to sixty parties is read as a document that was sent to sixty parties, and in a founder-owned business that is the wrong signal to send about the asset or about the seller.
What it holds
A transfer to a party the owner chose on more than headline value, with the terms beside price written down before the negotiation rather than conceded during it.
We act for the seller alone. We do not hold a buy-side mandate in the same thesis while a succession mandate is running.