{"id":902,"date":"2011-09-02T07:44:44","date_gmt":"2011-09-02T14:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/?p=902"},"modified":"2011-09-02T07:44:44","modified_gmt":"2011-09-02T14:44:44","slug":"there-are-three-kinds-of-business-buyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/?p=902","title":{"rendered":"There are three kinds of business buyers."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is one of my favorite insights, since I lived this one in a positive exit from my computer business.\u00a0 Most people will tell you that there are two kinds of eventual buyers for your business: financial<\/em> and strategic<\/em>.\u00a0 A financial buyer will analyze your numbers, past and forecast, to the n\u2019th degree, and calculate the price based upon the result, after carefully comparing your numbers with those of others in the same and similar industries.\u00a0 The object of a financial purchase is to negotiate a bargain, capable of payoff through operating profits or growth over time, or even of immediate profit from arbitrage \u2013 knowing of a purchaser that is willing to pay more for your company if repackaged, or even with no changes at all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0A strategic purchaser is one that understands what your company has to offer in its marketplace, and how your company will add extra value to the purchaser\u2019s company.\u00a0 Strategic buyers look for managerial talent, intellectual property, geographic expansion, an extension into adjacent markets and more that will be achieved with the acquisition of your company.\u00a0 Such a purchaser usually is willing to pay more to secure this new leverage, understanding that the value of the acquisition is more than the mere financial value of your enterprise.\u00a0 Most investment bankers will coach you into helping them find you a strategic buyer, knowing that such sales are quicker, often less focused upon the small warts of a business, and yield higher prices than financial sales.<\/p>\n

[Email readers, continue here…]\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/em>There is a third class of buyer I discovered first hand when selling my company – the emotional <\/em>buyer.\u00a0 This rare buyer needs <\/em>your company.\u00a0 He must have you or one of your competitors, and now.\u00a0 The buyer may be a public company attempting to defend decreasing market share and being overly punished by Wall Street.\u00a0 You may represent the only obvious way to protect against obsolescence from a buyer\u2019s declining marketplace, or failure to compete against others with better, newer technologies.\u00a0 You may be a most successful direct competitor, one that the buyer\u2019s sales people have observed jealously and nervously, sometimes even jumping over to your company as a result. No matter what the emotional focus, the buyer cannot continue to stand by and watch its business challenged so effectively.\u00a0 The price negotiated is not at all the critical factor in the emotional sale.\u00a0 It is the elimination of pain that drives the buyer to action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I experienced just this phenomenon and profited by the added value in the transaction provided by an emotional public company buyer for my business.\u00a0 The potential buyer was a hardware company, well aware that margins were decreasing and that software companies, once considered mere vehicles to help sell hardware, were now becoming the central component in a sale, mostly because hardware was fast becoming a commodity as prices dropped.\u00a0 My buyer-candidate had previously licensed our firm as a distributor, a value-added reseller for its hardware.\u00a0 As we grew to capture 16% of the world market in our niche, we successfully migrated from the single platform of the buyer-candidate onto hardware from any of its competitors from IBM to NCR to HP and others.\u00a0 At the same time, the buyer-candidate realized that we had become its largest reseller.\u00a0 In one of many meetings with the buyer\u2019s CEO, I \u201caccidentally\u201d dropped the truthful fact that his hardware now accounted for only about a third of our hardware revenues, down from 100% several years earlier.\u00a0 It did not take but moments for him to realize that his largest reseller was giving his company only a third of its business, that his revenues were declining and ours increasing dramatically.\u00a0 Simple in-the-head math shocked him into the realization that, if he could increase our use of his equipment in more sales, that he could slow or stop the decline in his revenues and he could migrate into a more software-centric company, much more highly valued by Wall Street, which was punishing his company for its decline and coming obsolescence.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The resulting negotiation was rather quick and very lucrative for our side.\u00a0 It was the first time I had witnessed an emotional buyer, and appreciated the difference between \u201cstrategic\u201d and \u201cemotional\u201d immediately.\u00a0 Ever since, I have been urging my subsequent company CEO\u2019s and boards to perform an exercise at regular intervals to seek out and identify future strategic and emotional buyers.\u00a0 We\u2019ll describe that exercise in the next insight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is one of my favorite insights, since I lived this one in a positive exit from my computer business.\u00a0 Most people will tell you that there are two kinds of eventual buyers for your business: financial and strategic.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-liquidity-event-and-beyond"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}