Brief conversation between Andrew Gazdecki and another speaker about preparing a startup for acquisition. The core advice: start preparing well before listing (ideally several months), build a data room and documentation, and at minimum organize folders now so materials are easy to find when needed.
How early should I start preparing for an acquisition?
Yeah, the earlier the better. Ideally you want to have at least a few months to prepare. The worst thing you'd want to do is just wake up one day and be like, okay, I'm going to list and I'm going to put this listing up on acquire.com no data room, no documentation. That's a buyer's worst nightmare, seeing that, because it just shows you're not prepared and you're not serious. A lot of times founders, they'll get an unsolicited offer and then they'll ask us, hey, is it time to take this offer? They're still going to need to put these documents together anyways. The data room, all of these documentation sops in place, make sure sure just take the time to do these things. And typically it takes a good amount of time and it could be at least a couple months to a month.
I would say just start preparing today if you have the time. It doesn't have to be like a complete data room if you're not going to market, but just start putting stuff in certain folders and just putting a. Have a place where things can easily be found and when the time is right, just that alone will help move all the work forward.
