Acquire.com Academy - Introduction

How's it going? My name is Andrew Gazdecki. I am the founder of Microacquire. My background, I've been an entrepreneur my whole career. I built and sold two different companies and I built Microacquire to help entrepreneurs get acquired. And a big part of that is understanding everything about acquisitions from valuations to the legal process to due diligence to negotiating with buyers. There is so much involved in the process and so I'm really just going to go through a lot of different topics that I think entrepreneurs should know as they're preparing their company for an acquisition. And this is really just information and processes that I've seen as me personally selling a, I bootstrapped a SaaS company to about 10 million in annotating revenue and that was acquired by a private equity firm. So I also want to talk about the differences between strategic buyers and financial buyers. A private equity firm as a financial buyer and just how to prepare your startup for an acquisition. So when you go to the table with buyers, you're prepared because for a lot of buyers you're definitely at a slight disadvantage. So the more you know the better because this is potentially a life changing exit for you. But for the potential buyer, it's Tuesday, they're looking at tons of deals. And so I'm going to be going over, you know, everything from how to prepare your startup for an acquisition, what are the legal steps, how to correctly value your startup, which is really important when speaking to buyers. Just having an understanding of kind of what you're startup is worth, even within a range. Sure, Slack can get acquired by Salesforce for 30 times annual recurring revenue, but that's probably not your business, it wasn't mine either. So understanding that is crucial. Also things like due diligence, what is it, what to expect? Also talking about this is just the team Microquire, but what else we got common deal structures. You know, a lot of founders don't understand that there's, there's ways to increase offers to your startup by being creative with deal structures, by really working with buyers. Whether that's with typically the most common is seller financing where you can, let's say you have a million dollar startup and you negotiate something with the buyer where they pay 50% upfront and then the other 50% over the next 12 months or something like that. And that increases your buyer pool by an immense amount because it de risks the acquisition for both you and the buyer or mostly for the buyer, which is a great way to widen the buyer pool. You're taking on some risk by seller financing, which essentially means that they would pay you a monthly payment every single month. And I'll go over that in detail. But really, this is what I want to my goal for this course. And I hope this helps entrepreneurs just really understand the acquisition process, how to be as prepared as possible when speaking with buyers and ultimately successfully get your company acquired. It's such an important part of the founder's journey we build companies to someday. Not all entrepreneurs, but me personally, I sold a business and it had a life changing impact. And I hope this information, this is what I wish I had. And so I hope this helps entrepreneurs really be on better footing and increase the chances of their startup being acquired, ideally on micro acquire. So I hope you enjoy this.