For CPAs, attorneys, wealth advisors, and coaches
Your client will sell once. They should not pay the tuition for someone else’s first deal.
I work with advisors who want a deal specialist at the table without handing over the relationship. You keep the client. I take defensible value, buyer behavior, deal structure, and process.
When to bring me in
The four calls I get from advisors
- A client received an unsolicited offer and asked whether it is fair.
- I read the offer the way the buyer wrote it: the note, the working capital peg, the earnout, and what diligence will go after. Your client gets a straight answer, and so do you.
- An owner is three to five years from an exit and has never been looked at the way a buyer will look.
- The free assessments are the fastest first step. They take fifteen minutes and nobody calls your client afterward unless they ask.
- A sale is underway and diligence, structure, or working capital has become the fight.
- A second set of eyes from a practice that has closed roughly 2,400 of these. Sometimes the fix is one sentence in the purchase agreement.
- You want a second opinion before your client signs with a broker they found online.
- I will tell you whether the engagement, the fee, and the plan make sense for that business, even when the answer is that someone else should run it.
How we work
You stay the primary relationship
I come in for the transaction question: what the business is worth, how a buyer will underwrite it, what the structure does to the proceeds, and how the process should run. You stay in the loop on every step that touches your work, whether that is the tax structure, the estate plan, or the balance sheet. When the deal is done, the client is still yours.
I have spent 34 years in business valuation, exit planning, and M&A advisory as Managing Partner of Indiana Business Advisors, and I hold the CVA, CM&AA, CEPA, and CMEA designations. Advisors bring me in when a client is facing a sale, an offer, or a value question that needs a deal specialist.
Resources you can hand to a client
Three free assessments and a book
Send these to a client who is not ready to talk to anyone yet. The assessments are free, take about fifteen minutes, and produce a report the client keeps. Nobody calls them afterward unless they ask.
- Value Builder Assessment: how the business scores on the eight drivers a buyer pays for.
- Freedom Score: the after-tax number at which a sale makes the owner financially independent.
- PREScore: whether the owner is personally ready to exit.
- Done Deal: Exit Without Regret: the conversation I have with every client before a process starts, written down. If a client has an offer in hand, send them Chapter 24, free.
Lunch and learn
I will bring lunch and the books. I am looking for sellers.
If your team works with business owners, I am glad to come to your office with lunch and copies of Done Deal and spend the hour on what is happening in the market: what buyers are paying, which businesses are selling and which are sitting, where the puck is going for owners over the next few years, and what your clients should be doing about it now. Bring the questions your clients are asking you.
I am looking for owners who are thinking about selling, whether that is next year or in five, and I say so up front. When someone at the table has a client like that, I want to be the person you call. You keep the client. I take the deal question.