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What do you do when growth stalls? When sales stay flat? When competition fences
you in on all sides? One of the most powerful and under used vehicles for
growth is acquisition.
In other words you grow your company by buying someone else's. Unless you're
running a large corporation, the idea of acquisition may seem too complicated or
too risky to consider. David Braun, the author of Successful Acquisitions
invites you to think again. "All companies are looking for ways to grow. Some of us
are struggling with finding ways to grow our companies because we are in mature
markets.
And what I find most companies focusing on first --
rightly so -- is internal growth. A look at adding more sales people or doing more
advertising or
bundling their products or repackaging their products,
but what they often don't look at
is external growth,
acquisitions
And many cases I think it's because they're intimidated. They think it's only
for the big companies
the ones that have these
massive balance sheet resources and big teams of people to be their M&A
departments.
But the truth the matter is ninety seven percent of all acquisitions are
what we would call mid-market, below $500 million in size,
and for many companies acquisitions can be a incredibly powerful tool."
As a growth strategy
acquisitions have multiple benefits.
David Braun focuses on three key advantages. "Number one they allow us to
calibrate our business. They allow us to, with precision,
move in or out of markets. There's nothing can do
to move faster than acquisitions to move you in or out of markets or
technologies or customers or applications. So, that's number one,
calibration.
Number two is it allows you to pick winners.
So it allows you to focus in on identifying companies have already
proven
to the marketplace that they're successful. And that's a successful
either company or technology or application or
or location whatever the case may be that you're focused in on.
Number two is it allows you to pick winners.
And number three is,
it's fast.
There is nothing that you can do that would be faster
than through an acquisition to be able to move in or out of markets.
So acquisitions, while not for everyone,
I think are in many cases a hidden opportunity that many companies
overlook.
It can be a very powerful tool when your toolbox to growing your business."
In making acquisitions,
the difference between success and failure hinges on your underlying strategy.
"The common mistakes that I see people make when they're thinking about
acquisitions
is they tend to very reactive as opposed to proactive with acquisitions.
They tend not to think in advance about why I would want to make an acquisition
and what would be an ideal company for me. Here's my strategy, here's what I
have today,
here's what I need and here's how I'm going to go out and find those companies
to come into it
And what most companies, probably the number one mistake that I see,
is that they are reactive to opportunity. So they look at a company that they
already know,
that's on the radar screen,
or most commonly,
is a company that's for sale.
And it doesn't mean that for-sale companies are bad companies necessarily, but
what it does mean is that a company is reacting
to opportunities as opposed to proactively saying,
'Here's our strategy,
here's what we want and here are the kind of companies that we can move forward with.' "
So there's the problem,
acquisitions fail when they are approach without a proven plan
and here's the solution that David Braun has created based on his twenty years of
helping companies grow, a step-by-step Roadmap to Successful Acquisitions.
I wrote Successful Acquisitions because
I couldn't find anything out there that was like it.
All the book that I saw around M&A were
really one of two flavors.
A: They were very legal oriented, very much about
the legal transaction, the legal documents, written almost by lawyers for lawyers.
If it wasn't that then it was very financially oriented, big long tomes
about the financial aspects of mergers and acquisitions,
lots of detail about how to look at financing and valuing companies.
But again, it was almost
written by financial people for financial people.
What I didn't see
was a business book written for business people.
And why I wrote Successful Acquisitions was really to help
CEOs and executives of companies
be able to put together an M&A process for them and their companies with
the language that they're going to be most comfortable with. So my hope
for Successful Acquisitions is that the business community is going to be able
to have it be something that they can read, but more importantly something they
can actually use."
Successful Acquisitions is the first major book on buying companies
for the small to mid-size market.
It's a detailed battle plan for buying the right company in the right way.
The process that we talk about in Successful Acquisitions
is a little different than maybe other books have been
written in the marketplace.
This isn't a process that I created and then went and tested on the market.
This was a process that came out of my experiences of working with companies
all over the world - big companies, small companies, service providers,
manufacturing companies, all different kinds a companies, public companies. private
companies -
and through all of those experiences
and seen the common threads that went through those
I created a process to be able to say, here is,
regardless of the industry that you're in, regardless of the size of the company
that you are,
here's a process that works,
here are the key tools
and steps that it takes to be successful
at completing a successful acquisition.
Successful Acquisitions gives you a complete Roadmap in three stages:
Building the Foundations, Building the Relationships
and Building the Deal. Lastly, there's the all important step of integrating the
company you have just acquired.
Successful Acquisitions is a practical manual filled with tips and examples
from real transactions. The book gives you all the tools, checklists and charts
that David Braun uses for the acquisitions he manages day-by-day.
When I sat down to write this book, I made the very deliberate decision
that I was going to hold nothing back.
I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a book filled with concepts
and ideas,
but it was actually a book that had
the tools and the techniques that one needed to be
successful implementing the concepts and ideas.
For example, when I talk about the need to have
a well-defined
prospect profile of the ideal company that you would want to acquire,
in the book I go into great detail about
the tool
to allow you to define the company,
have a process to rate and then prioritize those companies.
Or when you get to the point the process where somebody has to make contact
with an owner of the company.
How are you going to go about doing that?
What's that first call like?
What's that first meeting like?
So I go in great detail on the book about
how to go about doing that, and what a first meeting is about, and
what your agenda might look like.
So I was very deliberate insane I wanted this to be a book that was filled
with great concepts and ideas,
but more importantly with that the tools to help you be successful
at implementing these concepts and ideas."
Successful Acquisitions is the real world guide to buying companies.
If you care about business growth, this is the one book you cannot afford to miss.
I do one thing and that is tell companies to grow.
To me that's a lot more than just top-line revenue or financial
engineering or
deals in transactions
um... asthma but i have the same amount of warm outfits that says
that my mission
is to help my client's implement their dreams
and my hope is that with this book
that owners and executives of companies can take it
it and get ideas and and new ways of thinking about how they might
successfully be able to implement their dreams
for how they want to grow their business
six estelle acquisitions can be pre-order del amazon dot com
enjoy the book and be sure to tell others about this important publication