"Prepare, prepare, prepare"

Prepare, prepare, prepare

Proper preparation prevents poor performance - so the saying goes. This is especially true when selling a business. The more effort spent preparing a company and its management for the sale process, the more attractive it becomes to buyers. It is never too early to start - a year to eighteen months before sale is recommended. Call us to find out more.

Buy more time with your sweetheart

New research which coincides with World Heart Day finds that 45% of middle-aged men would wait until they were already ill before changing their lifestyle and behaviour. And the inequality in life expectancy between men and women is growing wider with men falling behind at a faster pace than ever. M&A Expert David Young, Chief Executive of Shield Corporate Finance, says, "For workaholic entrepreneurs who decide they need to devote more time to their partners and families while they are still healthy, there are huge rewards to be had by selling a stake in their company to private equity."

Benefits to selling a share include:

Less anxiety and stress - no more night sweats!
Extracting "Drop dead money" from the business (a cash reserve for the family in the event of untimely death), perhaps to buy a second home, boat or car, or to travel the world...
Retaining an interest in the business - keeping a hand "on the tiller"
Keeping your status as a business owner
Incentivising loyal staff
Preserve a significant stake in the up-side (in the future potential of the business)

"The added bonus is that this is often a time when business owners' start taking more risks - and their business really starts humming! I have seen this give a business a whole new lease of life, such as with AES, an engineering company where the founder took in a minority equity investor, maintained control, and felt free to start taking calculated risks for the first time - the business grew dramatically." says David Young. Call us to find out more..

References: TNS Onlinebus conducted 183 interviews with men aged 45-64 on 24th-27th August 2006. In 1940 women outlived men by 4.4 years - today the average is nearly 7.

About Shield

Selling a business? Contact David Young, Founder & CEO, of Shield on 020 7031 8265

In 2001, David Young founded Shield Corporate Finance as an independent specialist advisory firm, to provide world-class M&A advice without regard to transaction size and without conflicts of interest. With a special interest in the keys to success in divestiture work, Shield is committed to producing remarkable results for shareholders. Shield has offices in London, Cambridge and Poole, representatives in Beijing and Johannesburg, and alliances with Soft Bank in Japan and Kingsway and Tianyi Securities in China.