Selling Your Professional Service Firm: A Primer

By: David C. Baker

Narrated by: David C. Baker

I’ve written this book because selling your business is quite possibly the biggest financial transaction of your entire life, and you’ve never done it before and will likely never do it again, and you really need to be smart about this.

I recently did a quick study on the likelihood that a firm in a particular, narrow vertical would have a successful exit—defined as someone else purchasing, for real money, a majority of your firm’s equity.

It’s not a great sales tactic to give you that number at the start of a book you just purchased, but the answer was roughly 1%, or 1 in 90. Ouch.

To use marketing firms as an example, roughly 1,000 firms are purchased every year in the U.S., of the roughly 90,000 firms that exist in the country at any given point. Of course, firms exist over an average lifetime that spans multiple years, so the odds of a successful purchase increase as a firm gets nearer its maturity, but they still aren’t great.

But there’s an important corollary to that truth, and it’s this: There are many things you can do to improve your odds, turning that likelihood into a 1-in-4 chance that you’ll sell your firm.

And then once you do set yourself up for a possible exit, there are some fantastic inside techniques to maximize the upside while also minimizing the risk.

This book is generally about selling your firm, but you can easily flip these principles around and be more successful at buying a firm, too.

We’ll also cover many other elements of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and the larger succession picture, including the requisite valuation of your firm.

The information in this manual comes from hard-earned experience in guiding 200+ transactions on both the buy- and sell-side, including searches, partnership splits, internal transfers, and everything else you can imagine.

Our experience comes from firms in the marketing, creative, and digital space, but the principles all apply to the larger professional services space.

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