You’ve taken the risks, you’ve made the sacrifices, you’ve invested the sweat equity, the buck has always stopped here — but now it’s time. Time to take your chips off the table, time to pass the torch, time to sell your company. You’ve got one shot and the stakes are high.
What to do?
With an exclusive focus and long history of success in sell-side M&A, there are a number of benefits to working with Sequoia.
We have sold our client’s companies for significantly higher than their expected values — we are happy to provide client references to substantiate this statement.
For more than sixteen years straight, Sequoia has flawlessly executed the same process year-after-year — the sale of privately-held companies like yours.
Since the vast majority of our fee structure is contingent upon the sale of the company, your fee risk is minimized until the sale completes — that aligns our objectives with yours.
As fully licensed professionals, we maintain errors and omissions insurance, uphold our fiduciary duty to our clients, and are bound by a duty of perpetual confidentiality.
From our initial engagement through to closing, the process typically takes nine months and consists of the following four phases.
Prior to entering into an engagement and before any work fees are paid, we assess your business and its target market of strategic purchasers to ensure it is a fit for Sequoia’s process and confirm that there is alignment on valuation expectations and timing.
To prepare a successful marketing campaign for your company, we gain a thorough understanding of your company and the industry to clearly communicate its benefits to potential buyers. We create a broad market of potential buyers to increase valuation and provide you with options.
Once your company’s marketing campaign is ready for launch, there will be approximately 2,500 targets to which the opportunity is exposed, including both strategic and financial buyers. Sequoia’s marketing is about much more than just exposure, however. It is a direct sales process to each party in the target market. The rigour of each campaign strives to extract the maximum value the market is willing to pay for your company and identify buyers with the best cultural fit.
Sequoia’s role at this stage is to coordinate activities between the parties, their lawyers and other advisors keep all parties focussed on the “finish line” and negotiate the terms of the final definitive agreements.
When selling a company, professional sales expertise is a must. Sequoia’s M&A specialists are seasoned sales professionals that ensure successful transactions through the following factors.
Passive marketing yields sub-prime results. Mid-market businesses do not sell themselves — Sequoia actively markets the value drivers of your company through a competitive sales process.
Closing a transaction demands attention to 100% of the details. Packaging your business, defining a market, qualifying buyers, anticipating challenges, negotiating the best terms, defending value, managing deal momentum, defusing emotion, and sweating the details.
Whenever you create competition for something you possess, the possession increases in value.
We know what information to disclose, when to disclose it, and to whom to disclose it in order to preserve the confidentiality of the sale of your company.
A family-owned company that directed the site management and construction for some of the largest industrial plants built in the history of Canada.
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