Protegrity Advisors

Selling Your Business

Hiring the correct M&A Advisor is one of the most important decisions a business owner can make. Simply listing a business on a website, providing only basic information and not having a network of existing relationships—as might be the case with a business broker—is not an effective way of finding qualified buyers or maximizing your company's sale price, particularly for businesses with revenue above $5 million.

Protegrity Advisors has advised business owners on sell-side M&A transactions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, selling to public and private companies, private equity firms, family offices, search funds, serial entrepreneurs, and others.

Our M&A Sell-Side Services Include:

  • Valuations – An objective understanding of all relevant factors that determine your company's current market value is critical to understanding potential sale prices, evaluating whether the time is right to commence the process and determining what steps to take to maximize that sales price. Having Protegrity Advisors prepare a market valuation is a worthwhile first step under any circumstances.

  • Packaging and Presenting the Business – Positioning your business and its products or services, employees and management team, customer base, sales channels, intellectual property, market segment and historical and projected future financial performance in the best possible—and credible—light is critical to attracting interest from the right qualified buyers and maximizing your company's value, particularly for family-owned businesses. For example, simply providing financial statements prepared by your outside accountant will undervalue your business since their expertise is to minimize profits for purposes of reducing tax exposure. Our financial analysts leave no stone unturned to present your business on an "adjusted" basis to maximize valuation in a credible manner, which is how most private equity and strategic buyers are accustomed to assessing a company's current market value.

  • Finding and Negotiating with Qualified Buyers – Whether you believe you already have a buyer or are seeking multiple bidders, Protegrity Advisors has years of experience researching, identifying, qualifying and negotiating with all types of buyers and structuring a wide variety of deal terms. We also have relationships with highly qualified private equity and strategic buyers who look to us for deals. Attempting to negotiate directly with a buyer or bringing in legal counsel too early in the process can be counter-productive and put your deal at substantial risk. Our M&A team understands the process thoroughly, can help you avoid costly mistakes, and will allow you to focus on running your business. Many of our clients come to us with a buyer, because they realize that by having Protegrity involved and leading, they will be in a much better position to maximize the purchase price and mitigate the risk to the deal and to their underlying business.

  • Divestitures – Companies with $50 million or more in revenue may have business units or subsidiaries that could be ripe for divestiture. However, many of these companies do not have the internal resources, bandwidth, or expertise to confidentially and effectively analyze whether a divestiture is an option that should be explored and manage all of the steps in the process.

    Types of business units or subsidiaries to consider divesting include:

    • lack of fit with overall corporate strategy
    • disruptive of internal processes (e.g., different business models, capital requirements, or compensation structures)
    • drain on the rest of the company
    • the rest of the company is holding it back
    • disproportionate demands on management time and attention

    Benefits of divestitures include:

    • generating short-term cash and reducing long-term expenses
    • removing distractions and operational inefficiencies
    • enabling increased attention and budgets on core business areas
    • more focused management attention

    To provide companies with the support required to perform the analysis, decision-making, and practical execution related to divestitures, Protegrity Advisors has developed a specialized Corporate Divestitures practice along with Protegrity Advisory Board member Dr. Emilie Feldman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an internationally renowned authority in the fields of corporate strategy and corporate governance.

    Our Corporate Divestiture services include:

    • analyzing net impacts to the company (e.g., cash flow, operational, resources, legal, costs)
    • packaging and positioning the business unit for maximum valuation
    • identifying and qualifying potential buyers
    • supervising the exchange of information
    • negotiating the purchase price and terms
    • coordinating between internal departments and service providers