The Greywood Difference
There are many reasons why business owners who are considering selling their business should choose Greywood to act as their dedicated transaction advisor:
Realistic Valuation
We conduct a thorough financial analysis and consider a number of qualitative and quantitative factors in determining the most probable selling price for your business. We use market data from the sale of similar companies to justify our valuation and to support future negotiations with buyers. With in-house Chartered Accountant and Chartered Business Valuator expertise, you can rely on our valuation to ensure your expectations are realistic but fair.
Confidential
Successfully conducting a confidential business sale is our top priority. We approach prospective buyers confidentially, perform due diligence on all interested buyers, evaluate buyer intent, and carefully qualify buyers before sharing sensitive information with them. Controlling the flow of information throughout the process is essential to protect the sensitive nature of the transaction from your competitors, customers, employees, and suppliers.
Professional Expertise
We founded Greywood Partners after recognizing a major gap in the market: business owners ready to retire or move on to a new venture were often left to seek advice from accounting firms that weren’t set up to sell companies, or from business brokers with limited business education and technical expertise. At Greywood, we believe that selling a company is more than just a finance, accounting and legal matter; it is also a sales and marketing matter, and we have the collective expertise to cover all the angles.
Proactive and Research Intensive
We don’t wait around for buyers to call us. Often, the best buyers aren’t even planning on an acquisition but, when presented with the right opportunity for growth, will value the target business at a higher value than a buyer looking for a standalone business. Our experience tells us that the best way to find these strategic buyers is to build a comprehensive list of prospects through a proactive, research-intensive search, and then confidentially contact each one. There are no shortcuts.
Network of Qualified Buyers
We find interested and qualified buyers through our relationships with accountants, lawyers, wealth managers, private investors, and private equity firms. We gain access to foreign buyers through our global network of 51 law firms across 43 countries. We leverage our international database of companies currently operating in your industry. Our goal is to generate multiple buyers to create a competitive bid process and give you a choice of who you sell your business to.
Getting you the Best Deal
The value of a business isn’t simply based on its assets, cash flows and profitability. A business is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it, and we work hard to maximize that figure. Factors such as growth, risk, synergies, tax savings and deal terms all affect what a buyer will pay. Greywood acts for you in negotiating the price and structuring of the deal. We implement strong and fair negotiation principles to ensure deals get closed smoothly and value is not left on the table.
Value Added Service
We invest the time to prepare your business for sale. We conduct a strategic and financial analysis, and advise you how to increase the salability of your business. Our team will work shoulder-to-shoulder with you to implement our recommendations and present your business in the best light possible. Getting a business ready for sale is often rewarded with better pricing and a lower risk of a deal falling apart in due diligence. In addition, we can engage and work with outside tax specialists to structure the transaction in a way that minimizes your future tax burden.
Team Approach
Our business model was built to incentivize our team to work together to secure the best price and terms for our clients. We don’t compensate our team under a 100% commission model – commonly used within our industry - because this leads to only one broker working on selling your business. Our multi-disciplinary team collaborating for the 500 to 1,000 hours that it takes to successfully close the sale of a company leads to a better outcome for our clients. We also structure our fees to align our incentives with yours, so we are motivated to get you the best deal possible.