Sell Your Company in 150 Days – Part 2: Client Evaluation & Listing Agreement

Stage 2: Client Evaluation and Listing Agreement Execution

ECP Ventures offers a disciplined, diligent, structured 10 Stage 150 Day sales transaction process for business owners to sell their businesses with sell side M&A representation.

At ECP we do our own sell side due diligence to determine if we are willing to accept a new client. We only accept clients that own high quality companies with high integrity management.

In order to accept a new client, we have to be 90% confident that we can conduct an offering and successfully close a transaction and meet or exceed our clients' quantitative and qualitative objectives. We must feel that we can offer our client's company to the market with pride, dignity and confidence.

Our Due Diligence Process

This process starts with the execution of our firm's Mutual NDA. Once we have a dually executed NDA, we request a substantial amount of financial data to conduct our sell side due diligence. We challenge our prospective clients to convince us about the value of their company. If they can convince us we are very confident that we can convince the marketplace.

Since we are success fee only firm, it only makes sense that we do our sell side due diligence before engaging a new client. If we are impressed by the company, it is almost a certainty that the market will be too. We work 100% for our sell side clients as their fiduciary. However, we also strive to earn and maintain the respect of our buyers. We have a mantra with the buyer's that we work with. "We will never waste their time and we will never let them waste our time". Time is the most valuable commodity that we have and we are very respectful of our client's time and our buyer's time.

The Listing Agreement

Once we agree to represent a company, we issue our firm's exclusive listing agreement to our new client(s). Our listing agreement is deliberately very short. It is one page with 10 clauses and it is written in plain English. It clearly states what we will do and what we will not do. Eight clauses define what we will do. Two clauses state what we will not do which is we will not charge any upfront or guaranteed fees and we will not include a "tail" provision. It will be a one-year (Performance Period) agreement. Since we feel that we can sell any high-quality company in 150 days a one-year term is an ample length. If we do not successfully conclude a transaction in one year, we should be out our time and money and we should get out of the client's way.

We are comfortable offering our clients a no risk success fee engagement. Then we work together collaboratively as a tandem to achieve their goals and objectives.