🧐 What I Learned Last Week 5.19.23
Curating the best M&A, SMB, and EtA-related content each week.
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📰 Articles
Acquisition #8 - Supportguy.co
The team at XO Capital goes behind the scenes into their latest acquisition - Supportguy.co. The purchase aligns with XO’s vertical integration strategy, which aims to own the tools they use to manage their portfolio. Support Guy represents the company's initial investment in AI, with plans for more. Despite some challenges during asset transfer, the acquisition has been completed successfully.
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State of the Industry Report 2023
Empire Flippers released their latest report that analyzes M&A trends within online businesses. The big takeaway is that there’s still a lot of price discovery happening in the market. Highly recommend checking out the report if you’re looking at the online business space.
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The M&A Masterclass
The title is self-explanatory here. The good attorneys of SMB Law Group put together a masterclass on buying a small business. I have no doubt that the content will be awesome so go ahead and sign-up.
A rough agenda of what’s to come is the following:
Introduction to M&A
M&A Players & Overview of the Process
Preparatory Stage - Conducting a Search
Preliminary Documents - Letters of Intent
Structuring the Deal
Valuing a Business
Due Diligence
Financing the Deal - SBA Debt
Financing the Deal - Equity Investors
Purchase Agreement - Purchase Price Mechanics (including Seller Financing)
Purchase Agreement - Representations & Warranties, Covenants and Indemnity
Ancillary Agreements
Tax Matters
How to Find Good Transactional Specialists
Rescuing Your Deal
Closing Your Deal
Final Thoughts / Additional Resources
🧵 Best of Twitter
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Understand the risks…
It’s a marathon, not a sprint…
M&A is more of an art than a science. Listen to your gut. Know when to walk away…
There are ways to minimize the PG risk…
Just one data point but perhaps the start of a larger shift…
Interesting data and subsequent discussion…
SBA-prequalified doesn’t mean much…
Great breakdown…
Strategies to increase pricing…
🤔 Thoughts, Events, Other
⚒️ Tools & Resources
I want to share some tools & resources that I have found helpful. Please note that some of these may contain affiliate links. This means that I may receive compensation if you sign-up and use them.
DueDilio - #1 marketplace to hire highly vetted M&A due diligence service providers. Your source for finance, legal, tech, and other key areas of due diligence. Submit your project, review proposals, and hire.
PrivSource - PrivSource helps you source deals and connect with transaction partners without ever paying a success fee.
BizNexus - Marketplace + off-market origination in one platform. The marketplace averages about 10k active listings & pre-CIM opportunities, and the off-market origination focuses on data & multi-channel. Local Boston company and I consider the founder (Adam Ray) a friend.
X5 Deals - Proprietary deal sourcing. They do the outreach and send you relevant, actionable deals directly into your inbox.
Import Dojo - a newsletter that sends eCommerce and Amazon FBA businesses for sale to your email inbox. They send deals each Wednesday at 9:00 AM CST.
Scott Oldford - If you're interested in gaining insight into the process of building, scaling, acquiring, and selling online businesses, Scott Oldford can help.
Deal Flow Scout - Peer-to-peer deal flow exchange. Free, open, transparent.
Deal Sourcing Guide - A directory I put together of online marketplaces, brokers, DFY deal flow, and more.
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Important Disclaimer: This newsletter is provided for informational & educational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. This newsletter may link to other websites and certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, it has not been independently verified. The Business Inquirer makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. References to any companies, securities, listings, investments, or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any business, tax, or investment decisions. Content in this newsletter speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others.