Transferring Assets - Acquire.com Academy

All right, you are getting to the finish line. So in this video I'm going to be going over to how to smoothly transfer assets in a SaaS acquisition. So before you offer a buyer the keys to your startup, ensure you know how to transfer the assets under acquisitions. So obviously acquisitions can take a lot of work and this is really where you're getting to the end. So ideally you've signed a purchase agreement. Gotta say this legal help is crucial. MA advisor help is crucial. And that's one thing I really want to just mention again and again and again. For just, you know, a few thousand dollars, you can really de risk the acquisition for you as a founder because again, people who are buying these companies buy a lot of them. So this is something they do every month. But for you as an entrepreneur, this is going to be a life changing event. So you want to maximize that opportunity. So bring the right people onto your team to just review your transition plan, you know, outlining your ip, your domains, your trade secrets, your brand, your customer list, your patents and other copyrights. Now, what to do before you close. If you've already signed the purchase agreement, you can skip this. But in terms of talking about your IP and proprietary technology, trademarks, copyrighted assets, patents and so on, you can read all this, but you want to have legal agreements that protect your IP from anyone else using it, reproducing it or distributing it without your consent. So that's kind of standard. Also, every buyer is going to want to know who owns the code. So if you're working with an agency and you don't have a contract in place, you're going to want to get that and then also non disclosure agreements from the buyer. And also anyone, anyone else involved in the acquisition, will your hosting provider play ball? So this is something to really consider. So how hard is it to transfer the assets? I've transferred assets out of like an old hardware server over to aws, so I needed to work with the original owner to transfer those assets. And that's something we discussed and we agreed upon before. And again, that's where that relationship really is so important. So other things to consider is transferring people. This is huge. This is your team. These are the people that are going to keep working and helping support the business. Because on day one you're not going to know everything. So you want to talk to them first. You want to make them feel you want to come in with a new level of energy. Like, hey, I'm, this is my background. I have some really interesting ideas. I'm, you know, hopefully you're enjoyable person to work with and you can inspire them and encourage them to do their best work and really just bring that, you know, breathe in new energy into the business and get them excited that the business is being acquired. Because when you go and tell your team that you're going to sell your company, you get everything from am I getting fired? Am I becoming a millionaire? And every, everything in between. So the more that you can put the team at ease, the better. So talk to them first. Contractors, same thing. Treat them like team members because they truly are. Transferring customers. This can be a little tricky in some cases, especially if you have contracts and if it's an asset purchase, those contracts will probably need to be reassigned. So that's something to work out through the buyer. And again, all if you want to just read through the nitty gritty, I'm just trying to keep this high level. But once you've signed the asset purchase agreement, you're going to be changing hands. So all assets are moving over. You want to be specific about what actions you must take to transfer them and when they should be moved. So you want to have a plan in place with the buyer. On what day are you transferring the server assets? On what day are you transferring over the. Like this risk, this list here. So your Stripe account, your Chargify account, Braintree, whatever billing system you use. When are you going to transfer over your email accounts and lists such as through sendgrid or mailchimp or HubSpot or whatever email marketing tool that you use? Social media accounts, pretty straightforward advertising accounts. How are you going to transfer this over? Pretty easy. You can usually just grant someone as an administrator, hosting services. The buyer may have their own sort of hosting environment they want to migrate into the acquisition into. So that might be something to discuss. Are we going to do it, you know, late at night when not a lot of customers using the service, Planning that out is absolutely crucial. Then domains, contracts, and then what happens after closing. So one of the advantages of an asset purchase is that your business might be left intact after the asset changes hand. So this means you're free to continue building and serving customers or to take your business in a new direction. All you need to do is update the balance sheet. This really applies to the buyer. So that's another huge advantage to a buyer is an asset purchase allows them to have a clean break and they can start operating the business either under their current company or as a singular company. And these are things to potentially talk to buyers about, is what they plan to do with the business post acquisition and just make sure that you're both comfortable and really on the same page. Because acquisitions, you know, in my opinion, really are like the firm I sold to. I had a great relationship. I felt very confident going into that, and that was important to me. So definitely have a plan. And this can also be a huge, like, if I am speaking to a buyer or, excuse me, a potential founder, and they have a list of all the assets that they're willing to transfer over. And obviously they don't have like the passwords and stuff like that, but they have everything organized. And that just tells me, okay, this is going to be a smooth acquisition and probably a competitive one too, because they've really outlined all the things I was going to have to do on my own and made it as easy as possible for me as a buyer. And. And that's going to be really attractive to not just me, but to other buyers as well. So if you're looking to sell your business, definitely think about creating a just list out all the services that you use and how you could potentially transfer them over, or even just a list. And then from there you can work with a buyer on creating a plan on transferring those over. So I hope this article was helpful on how to smoothly transfer assets. It's actually, you know, a bittersweet moment, but once you sign the purchase agreement and the funds are transferred over, it is definitely all worth it. Cheers.