The Hidden Value of Your Business – And How to Unlock It When You Sell
You’ve spent years building a great business. While every business owner’s journey looks different, most owners eventually reach the point where it’s time to step back and sell. When you reach that time, make sure you get the full value of what you’ve built.
The Value of Your Business: Not Just About Your Financial Results
When it’s time to sell your business, prospective buyers will look at your historical financial results as part of their assessment of value. To ensure buyers recognize the maximum value of your business, it is critical they also fully appreciate the strengths that make your business special – which is far more than just the numbers on your financial statements. These strengths will be unique for each business, but examples include:
- Established brand, market position, and reputation
- Strong, long-standing relationships with blue-chip customers
- Experienced management team and loyal workforce
- Substantial growth opportunities
- Synergies available to a buyer
These strengths must be clearly highlighted and explained in the most compelling way possible for buyers to build these important aspects of your business into their assessment of value.
How the Right Advisor Helps You Unlock Your Business’ Full Value
Identifying all of a business’ strengths that will resonate with potential buyers, both qualitative and quantitative, is a key initial step in any transaction process.
In preparing a business for sale, Capital West takes the time to fully understand the nuances of the business to identify its unique strengths and prepare a plan to best position these strengths with potential buyers to maximize the business’ value. In recent Capital West deals, some of the unique differentiators of our clients’ businesses included:
- Brand strength
- Industry-leading safety record
- Longstanding customer relationships
- Diversity of customers and suppliers
- Available excess manufacturing capacity to support further growth
- Products or services that are “essential” (i.e. not impacted by economic conditions)
By working closely with each client to deeply understand their business, and not just their financial statements, we can use the following process to ensure their objectives for the sale are met and they receive full value for their business:
- Clearly and consistently emphasize the business’ strategic value to prospective buyers
- Use the business’ unique strengths and our market intelligence (combined with that of the client) to identify the right prospective buyers that will recognize the full value of the business
- Tailor the acquisition opportunity to each prospective buyer to highlight the business strengths most relevant to the buyer’s strategic priorities
- Actively pursue the right contact person at the prospective buyer that will champion the opportunity and be most excited by the business’ strategic value
- Maintain competitive tension between buyers to elicit the best offers
- Maintain momentum and interest from buyers by being highly responsive to questions and demanding buyers adhere to an efficient transaction timeline
Capital West’s proven process has helped business owners across industries achieve successful outcomes as they enter the next chapter of their journey. If you are looking for professional guidance in getting full value for your business, please contact any of our partners:
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About Capital West Partners
Capital West Partners is a leading independent transaction advisory firm based in Vancouver, BC. As mid-market M&A specialists, we deliver focused financial advice and transaction expertise to Western Canadian companies across a range of transaction situations, including:
- Divestitures
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Strategic Financings
- Valuations & Fairness Opinions
- Financial Advisory Assignments
Capital West has a proven track record of 30+ years of completing transactions that maximize value for our clients. Since inception, we have completed deals worth over $11 billion in total value.
Capital West is also a proud partner in IMAP (International Mergers and Acquisitions Partnership), a global organization of highly experienced mid-market advisory firms in over 40 countries with a track record of 50 years. Through IMAP, we maximize our global reach to bring industry and country expertise to every one of our assignments, and to find our clients the best buyers and investors in North America and beyond. www.imap.com