Stabilize, Optimize and Tune Up

We Do What We Are – Your CoPilot

CoPilot helps you do an internal evaluation and identifies those things going well and those things you need to fix, with a specific action to get it done.  All of this drives your profit and valuation higher, speeds the process to get things done, and mitigates problems, lowering risks; the trifecta of good business and deal-making.

We Listen, Ask and Understand

First and foremost, we seek to understand. So much so, we fight the stigma created by other consultants as we are more than just a whiteboard drawing, a PowerPoint, and an invoice. Consultants are frustrating sometimes.

Plan Together What to Do First and Why

Second, we create a bridge from your strategic goals to your tactical actions. The Why comes first, then What, then Who, and When. A plan with details.

Know and Show vs. Guess and Tell

Third, an accurate scorecard to measure our current status, and incremental progress toward our goals.

Ongoing Improvement, not just change

Ongoing, we, this means your team too, continue to identify what to keep doing, celebrate what is going well, then, evaluate things to stop doing, as they waste resources and then the good part, together we brainstorm, with experience and logic, new ideas to start doing.

We act as your advisor as if we are buying your company.  We look at your sales, marketing, operations, financials, and human resources.  We drive profit to you and prepare you for SEC-level due diligence.

Selling Your Business

Your Past Defines your Future Value.

When someone buys your company, the reason is for it to make money. Having your business demonstrate that it has made money, implies that the market is real, and you know how to serve it through marketing, sales, operations, and customer service.

Have a Future Plan

Having a plan, derived from your experience in the past and your vision for the future, demonstrates that the historical performance can be sustained and maybe even improved. Not having a plan, implies that the business is dependent upon you to run it. Your plan should include how you will grow your existing customer base, reduce attrition, drive increased deal size and open more and more doors to new markets and customers.

Future Cash Flow

Cash is the output of running your business, how it is being used and how it will be used to invest in yourself; commonly called operating expense (OpEx) and expected fixed-asset investment, (CapEx). The sustainment of existing cash flow and specific forecasts what is needed to do that, and forecasts in costs to grow it. Don’t overlook the importance of the variables that will drive changes in your OpEx/CapEx; They are deal killers.

Who Runs it and How it Runs

The team you have running the business, generating the revenue, using expenses, and investing in the future will either increase the value or not. If the business needs you, the risk to the future increases, if it doesn’t, the value of your business increases. You may have built it, but if the business depends on you, the future is risky. You should be working on the business not in it.

Buying a Business

Define an Acquisition Plan

Growing a company via acquisition must be evaluated against using the same resource (time & money) to grow it organically. Both have their pros and cons, or maybe a dual strategy makes sense. Creating a plan to grow what you already do (scale) or adding services/products to your offering you don’t currently provide (scope).

Find, Filter and Approach

Prospects will come from internal and external sources. Having a specific process and pre-defined roles to evaluate them sets the ‘tone’ for the rest of the relationship. A smooth, professional approach, creating simplicity out of the perception of complexity will establish you and your company as a serious buyer, even if it’s your first time.

Due Diligence

At this point, you have a formal agreement, in the form of an NDA and LOI. It’s an exciting time. Due Diligence is critical to validating assumptions, asking the right questions, defining the strengths and weaknesses. It is the buyer’s opportunity to completely understand what they are buying. There is no other opportunity to do this; You can never be thorough enough to both identify the value and set the acquisition up for success post-deal.

Architect the Proposal

No proposal gets created without knowing the value of the company. In addition to due diligence data, external market factors and recent comparable transactions drive the valuation. Get an external source to do it, they have more data than you, and now is the time to get your legal docs created. The proposal is just the starting point to define what the buyer is willing to pay and it starts the negotiation process.

Document, Negotiate, Close

It’s necessary to be formal at this stage. It’s also important to keep the deal simple. Be focused on being detailed in your research, valuation, deal terms, integration plans, not on building a ‘deal of the century’ that is going to be confusing and fail. This is the stage that should be easier, don’t make it harder.

Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

Integrating processes and systems is hard, but not the most important. Bringing together leaders from two companies into an organization, defining roles and goals, and having a unified, collaborative culture will make or break any deal, regardless of how the previous steps have gone, this is where a deal fails or succeeds. Success is defined by the results, not by the signatures on deal documents.