Offer on the table
Somebody made me an offer.
The headline price never moved. Nine hundred thousand dollars of it moved anyway, from their side of the table to his.
Offer Response Study · Buyer Credibility Check · LOI Counter Framework
A dozen confidential case studies from real engagements, each one a situation an owner was actually in. Find the one that reads like yours. We will send it to you, in full.
The headline price never moved. Nine hundred thousand dollars of it moved anyway, from their side of the table to his.
The headline price never moved. Nearly three million dollars of it moved anyway, from their side of the table to his.
$9.6M at six times earnings, thirty percent of it payable in the buyer's own shares. Nobody had valued those shares.
The first offer was $11.0M, and $6.35M of it was his at closing. Thirteen months later the business sold for $14.4M, almost all of it cash.
He already had an offer from somebody he knew and liked. Fourteen approaches later, the buyer he closed with was not that party.
He came to sign a sell-side mandate. We asked for ninety days of readiness work first, and it was worth $2.2 million to him.
It did not. The credential that lets the company pull a permit sat personally with the founder, and a buyer was eleven days from finding it.
He had capital, a lender and no idea who to call. The discipline that mattered was not finding targets. It was walking away from four of them.
Five targets priced. Across the five, sellers claimed earnings that were $1.3 million higher than the earnings that survived a close read.
He was not selling anything, and he still is not. What the study found was a buy-sell agreement funded to one fifth of what the business is worth.
A nine-partner firm where three partners over sixty-two held more than half the client billings. Every buyer prices that, and most price it harshly.
Four children. Two work in the business, two do not. The hard part was never the valuation. It was the other two.
Case studies are illustrative and anonymized. Figures are drawn from real engagements and adjusted to protect the parties.
Each case is matched to the situation it came from. Tell us two things and we send the version closest to yours, with the notes that apply to a business like yours.
The Value Protection Study tells you what your business is worth today, in fifteen pages. No fee, nothing to sign.