Blog

Financial stress rarely appears all at once. It usually cascades over time.  A company takes on debt to support growth. Working capital tightens. Interest expense rises. Customer payments slow. Margins compress. Before long, management is spending…Read More

Last year, U.S. companies raised approximately $2.4 trillion in capital outside of public markets. Most of it moved quietly, through a mechanism most people outside of finance have never heard…Read More

How Business Owners Can Plan for a Successful Transition  Most business owners spend years building value, but far fewer invest the time to plan how they will realize it. The…Read More

Valuation gaps emerge when buyers and sellers disagree on the value of a company and are often seen as a deal-breaker. In practice, it is more often a structuring problem to be solved. Sellers see the years…Read More

The Program Is Over. The Workout Is Not. When we first wrote about the Main Street Lending Program, the issue was straightforward: borrowers were approaching a five-year maturity wall and…Read More

When business owners think about sale terms, attention usually goes first to valuation. That is understandable. But price is only part of the story. The more important question is often when and under what conditions that value actually gets paid. This is where earnouts enter…Read More

Middle market M&A activity rarely slows because companies stop performing. More often, it slows or accelerates because buyers change their risk assessment. Economic cycles influence not just whether deals happen,…Read More

Not Every Private Company Is a Middle-Market Business Why understanding where your company fits is one of the most important decisions in any sale process When business owners begin thinking…Read More

Sellers often view LOI as the finish line in an M&A process. In reality, it marks the beginning of the most execution-intensive phase of the transaction. The period between LOI…Read More

Many business owners assume increasing the value of their company before a sale simply means growing revenue or improving EBITDA. Growth certainly helps. But in middle-market transactions, valuation is rarely…Read More