In this trailer, Peter Bigelow, an M&A advisor, reflects on the difficulties owner‑managers face when selling their businesses, using a sailing metaphor to illustrate the need to adapt to an unforgiving environment. He recounts a meeting with Harry Cohen, a successful stainless‑steel distributor, highlighting the emotional “behavioral click” owners experience when contemplating legacy and future chapters. Bigelow emphasizes the information asymmetry and fear that private‑transaction owners feel, contrasting it with investors’ familiarity with the process. He argues that traditional advisory firms rely heavily on technical expertise, whereas his firm prioritizes soft skills—empathy, listening, motivational interviewing, and appreciative inquiry—to assess whether a capital‑gain transaction aligns with personal and professional goals. He describes the client’s business as a scarce, valuable “Monet” versus the investor’s commodity, and stresses the importance of vetting investors. Finally, Bigelow explains his motivation for writing a book to capture the hard‑earned knowledge and alleviate the isolation owners feel during exit decisions.
Chapters
I think that Mother Nature is at times an unforgiving teacher. As a cruising sailor, you know, if you want to get a wake-up call, come with me some afternoon 100 miles offshore when it's blowing 40 and raining and you think the world's coming to an end, and you need to pick up your head and look at the horizon and realize I have to conform my behavior to Mother Nature. And we try to bring some of that hard-earned wisdom to our clients as they are working in their ecosystem, in their businesses.
Harry Cohen's company was one of the largest and most successful distributors of stainless steel tubing on the planet. Harry grew up in Brockton, a working-class city near Boston, where his father was a scrap metal dealer who bought unsorted scrap and resold it in large lots. Harry was a down-to-earth business leader, a trader extraordinaire, and he had grown the business to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Owner-managers frequently face a series of challenges that have to do with the external environment changing very rapidly and have to do internally with their own feelings about their business and where they're trying to take their business. What takes place is a little behavioral click where suddenly the owner feels like, "How am I going to get this thing to last beyond me? It's important to me financially and in every other way, how the next chapters of my life unfold." The scene was in our offices. Harry and I were meeting with two of the investor's senior officers.
They knew very well that we were evaluating a number of offers in addition to their own.
Very few people use our service multiple times, so the only thing that they know about an M&A advisory business is, you know, what— the horror stories they read in the newspaper or the country club or cocktail party chatter they've heard from other also uninformed friends. Now they find themselves in a, in a place, the private transaction market, that they've never been. They don't know what the rules are. They don't have the same amount of information as the investors do, who do this over and over. We really get how, uh, scary and uncomfortable it is.
There was a final number on the table. We were close, but I thought we could do better. I called for a timeout. Harry and I walked down the hall for a cup of java. "What are you doing, Peter?" he bellowed in his Boston accent. "We have him right where we want him.
Let's get him to sign." Our view is that what our client has is what's scarce and valuable, and what the investor has is a commodity. And we are interviewing investors to determine whether they deserve the opportunity to own this piece of the puzzle. This Monet that's our client's business.
Harry thought for a moment, played with his wedding ring, probably thought about what he was gonna say to Rosa if he shunned the current offer. He snapped to a decision.
There's a view that the kind of profession that we're in is dominated by people who have superb technical skills, hard skills. What we try to do at Bigelow is to develop the soft skills, the relationship-building skills, the listening skills, the empathy. The motivational interviewing, the appreciative inquiry. And with a skilled advisor who's listening to you, there should be able to be a determination of whether a capital gain transaction now satisfies your personal and professional goals.
"Let's go back in there, tell them they got a good deal, shake hands.
This is good for them and a good deal for us.
We want them to appreciate this business, to take care of it." He finished his speech with a line that's become part of the Bigelow lore: "So let's leave a few chocolates in the box of candy they're buying from us." I was called to write the book.
I so many times heard very, very close friends of mine, my clients, say to me after, at the end of a transaction, "Oh Pete, if I'd only known then what I know now." And I realized actually the stuff we're doing is knowable in advance. There's a body of knowledge that's represented by our scar tissue, our experience, that we can capture of the whys we do what we do and some of the hows we do what we do. So it was my goal to take these ideas and these concepts and make them easily available. I want them to feel a sense of relief that, wow, there's somebody talking in this domain who gets it, who gets the fact of how lonely and isolated I feel a lot of the time, of how much it feels like it's just on me, and that this person can help me navigate through the rocks and shoals of being able to choose What should happen to my business next?
