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News | Our Client is Going Back to Work

Our client is going back to work. The Acquisition Search Corporation (TASC) made it possible. Some investment bankers can help clients improve their finances. At TASC, clients entrust us with the quality of their lives.

A company majority owned by our client has acquired the service business and operating assets of a privately owned corporation. The Acquisition Search Corporation initiated this transaction, negotiated it on behalf of and acted as financial advisor to the buyer. The acquired business is a 3-time Inc. 500 provider of equipment maintenance and repair services to a service industry. It has an innovative, information technology-based approach to managing client relationships and more technicians in a single metro area than anyone else in its industry.

Our client has made a career of running successful businesses. He has applied an extraordinary work ethic and the ability to build strong personal relationships to create extremely loyal customers and employees and to turn these into well above average growth and profits. In the wake of a failed predecessor and on a shoestring investment, he built a distributor into an earthmoving equipment manufacturer’s largest dealer in the Western Hemisphere and second largest in the world. (“It didn’t seem fair,” he says. “Number one had the whole country of Italy. All I had was north Georgia.”) When the manufacturer decided it wanted to own its largest dealers, he reluctantly sold to them. He learned he enjoyed neither working for a large corporation nor retirement.

He decided to buy another business, not just because he wanted to be richer but because, for quality of life reasons, he felt he needed to get back to work. He then proceeded to make many of the mistakes of others with little experience in buying a business. Drawing on a large and loyal network, he sought introductions to companies actively seeking a buyer. The result was wasted time, disappointment and frustration. He concluded that socalled sellers were talking to him because no one else was interested, their price and other expectations were unrealistic or they weren’t really committed to a sale.

Deciding he had had enough, he sought out The Acquisition Search Corporation and our approach of buying a business that isn’t for sale, one whose owners have good reasons to consider a sale but aren’t actively seeking one. We quickly agreed he needed and wanted a lot of help. He asked TASC to take primary responsibility for:

• Helping him define his broad objectives for an acquisition
• Specifying criteria that would support these objectives
• Finding businesses that would fit these criteria, weren’t seeking a buyer but that would be open to serious discussion of a sale for reasons that didn’t involve an unrealistic price or bailing out of a failing company
• Deciding what he could offer them that would draw them into serious negotiations without the expectation of an excessive price
• Contacting them and generating their interest
• Assessing their attractiveness as acquisition prospects
• Valuing them and structuring and negotiating offers
• Together with other professional advisors, whom we helped select, managing due diligence and closing.

The Acquisition Search Corporation successfully did all of this and more. We generated a high degree of interest in an initially reluctant seller. Amidst an extremely unfavorable economy and capital markets, we structured and negotiated a transaction that provided considerable shelter from these external risks. The transaction was embraced enthusiastically by both buyer and sellers. For our client, the expected result will be not just the return on his investment but a great job and the return to a way of life he has sorely missed.

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