Navigating Business Sales: Understanding Brokers, M&A Advisors, and Investment Bankers |PRIME exits™

There are three different types of intermediaries that we have. We have the brokers, which are basically licensed agents within the state. Typically they cannot practice outside of their territory where they're licensed. And they have the ability to bind the seller to a price. So if you were going to sell your company and you agreed on a price and they would bring you an offer and you did not accept the offer, you still have to pay the broker the full commission. Then you have the mergers and acquisition or M and A advisors, which are basically intermediary. They have a broader spectrum in terms of the geography where they can work. I know in our company we have managing directors that can work across the US as well as internationally. And our job is to bring various buyers, which is a compendium of strategic private equity, institutional investors as well as family offices, and make those introductions to the sellers. And then you have the investment bankers, which they focus more on complex cases. They're more security licensed brokers and their work is more involved in selling fractions of companies or taking companies public.