A seller nearly lost a deal when a buyer inserted a clause blocking him from talking to other buyers, then used it to demand a lower price. Acquire.com's Kai caught the trap and helped him escape it. Small contract language can become a major problem in acquisitions.
Chapters
kind of a crazy story. Usually we set a certain price, we have certain reasoning and certain logic behind it. So what actually happened, something that we— I've never experienced before, was we've been in diligence with another buyer and the buyer had put in a clause and we had assumed everything was in good faith. Maybe this was a bad actor, I don't know. But they put in a clause where even after the diligence period was over, we weren't able to sell or solicit or talk to anybody else. They sent in their own thing and our Acquire.com acquisition manager actually pointed it out to us and helped us get around it, which was a massive help. That's why we got acquired. Otherwise we might've been stuck for a while, but they use that as leverage to negotiate the price down. It was pretty crazy. Thankfully we had Kai, that was our acquisition manager, and he helped us work through it and then did get acquired. But these are small things. Like if we had just used the acquire.com provided framework and templates, this would have not been a problem.
Yeah. And that's massive too. Small terms can definitely turn into big situations later on in the acquisition process.