PREPARING FOR THE DANCE, THE BUYERS’ LIST!

A key step in the sell-side merger or acquisition process is generating a list of potential acquirers. Today, M&A professionals avail themselves to extensive and expensive research tools which help them in identifying possible buyers for their sell-side clients’ businesses. This relatively straightforward exercise of identifying likely acquirers from databases may be greatly enhanced by a creative approach to recognizing potential buyers by a set of categories.

• Potential buyers who have Existing Relationships with the seller and the M&A professional’s proprietary database of buyers.
• Same-Industry buyers who might benefit from potential synergies.
• Prospective buyers in Related-Industries that may benefit from entering the seller’s business.
• The seller’s Supply-Chain offers another group of likely buyers.
• Identifying buyers seeking advantages from entering new Geographical Markets.

After the initial target list is created, the next step is applying a logical filter to reduce the set to a more focused set of buyers. Access to financial resources, a history of past acquisitions, and successfully integrating acquired companies may be the qualifiers to assist in reducing a list of potential buyers to a winning transaction for the seller.