Sell Your Company in 150 Days – Part 3: Client Provides Source Data

Stage 3: Client Provides Source Data for Offering

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.

A successful offering starts with a highly effective "value conveyance" to the market. A very strong value conveyance captures the interest of more qualified buyers and it identifies the tangible and intangible value characteristics of the company.

Learning Your Business Inside and Out

At ECP we take great pride in learning everything possible about our client's company so that we can showcase it very favorably in the market. It is critical to highlight and differentiate every valuable attribute of a company being offered. This illuminates the buyer to the true value of the company and it builds a foundation for the strongest possible value for the company.

Despite our well-intended efforts to learn your company, we will never know your company like you do. You have put in years or decades to build the value that you now have. This is the stage where we become collaborative partners in this process. We have designed an extensive questionnaire (Business Profile) for our clients to share their company history and knowledge with us.

A lot of business brokers tell their clients that the offering process is easy and that they will do all the work. We tell our clients the exact opposite. We truthfully tell our clients that we need their help and that it will require some dutiful efforts on their part. A very well completed Business Profile should take our clients between 10 and 20 hours to complete. That may sound like a lot of hours until you compare it to how many hours you have put into your company or that we are now seeking millions of dollars for your company.

Transparency is Key

Once we receive a completed Business Profile we evaluate all of the information provided. Then we schedule in person meetings with our clients to review all of the information provided to ensure that we have a complete and correct understanding of the information provided. This interactive stage ensures that we are all on the same page before we commence making external representations.

As a firm we encourage our clients to take a fully transparent open books and records (disclosure) approach to their offering. That approach conveys to the market both integrity of conduct and an assurance that the information provided may be relied upon. Even more important, it avoids surprises throughout the transactional process.

There are two things that are very averse to a successful offering. Time and Surprises. We execute a very disciplined timely process and we strive to avoid all surprises, good and bad. Buyers do not like to be surprised. They want to build a confidence level that they are working with good faith, truthful, fully informed sellers.

Once we have an internal concurrence that we have identified all key value attributes we convert your quality information into an offering document designed to showcase the true value of the company being offered.