Coyote Blog

This is something very familiar to our friend the coyote. Check out Cartoon Laws of Physics. Here's an example:

Cartoon Law I
Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.

Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.

When I describe what I do, the most common reaction is for people to ask "So how did you get into that?" The answer, as they used to say in the old electric razor commercials, is that it interested me so much, I bought the company.

Now, at some level, corporate acquisitions were not new to me -- I had worked with acquisitions and acquisition analysis in many of my corporate jobs. But these were large acquisitions - at least $20-$40 million in sales, and it was funded out of a large corporation's cash flow.

One fateful day, I decided that A) I hated working for other people and B) I had no groundbreaking entrepreneurial ideas of my own so that C) if I wanted to own a decent sized business, I would have to buy one.

Unfortunately, I had NO CLUE how to go find companies that were for sale and that I could afford. In fact, I was not sure at that point such opportunities even existed (again, when the rubber met the road, my Harvard MBA let me down). And, if the questions I get asked all the time are any indication, I was not the only one who didn't know how any of this worked.

So, let me share how it all worked for me. This is part 1. Also see part 2 and part 3.

Continue reading ‘Buying a Company Part 1 (or how I got into this)’ »