Early Thinking About Your Exit - Expert Coaching
Plan Ahead Knowing How the Game is Played
You've got a great business and niche, an excellent team, and a superb customer roster. To realize the financial benefits of the equity value you have built in the company and thoughtfully provide for the needs of all classes of stakeholders, is a complex problem to solve. To perform this task with the same thoroughness as your other activities, the initial step should be a methodical and unrushed assessment of strategic financial options and their implications for all affected stakeholders - guided, facilitated, and disciplined by an extraordinarily experienced mentor with the personality to listen to what you want and then relate that to the art of the possible - cutting quickly what won't work.
Michael Kane, Ph.D., J.D., the founder of Kane & Company, a 33-year-old FINRA/SEC private investment bank with 95 deals personally completed, hundreds more evaluated, and thousands of executives interviewed, is the perfect professional to facilitate your inquiry.
Why Michael Kane? Because he has extraordinarily broad and deep experience. He optimizes client outcomes, agnostic to any particular solution set. Most importantly, if his firm works with you, he is 100% accessible and intensively supports you - something exceedingly rare or nonexistent for Managing Partners of other types of firms whose business models rely on volume, not singular, serial execution, to deliver spectacular success.
Relevant experience: A diverse set of completed transactions at Kane & Company, sales, IPOs, mergers, etc. (first) Head of Technology Investment Banking, CIBC Oppenheimer, Technology Investment Banker at L.F. Rothschild (CIBC Oppenheimer), Computer Software, M&A and Securities Lawyer at Irell & Manella, 6th hire at DirecTV, and Project Leader in the System Sciences Department of The Rand Corporation.
Let's set up an introductory meeting to discuss getting you from where you are to where you want to go at your travel pace.
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Here is what I suggest for you now.
You are in the earliest preliminary stages of evaluating one or more possible pathways to realize the value of the equity you have built in your business. We understand you have no particular timetable or compelling motivation for near-term action. That’s great because there are 10,000 ways to do something you would not do in retrospect if only someone had taught you how strategic financial transactions such as IPOs, business sales, and accepting outside investment from private equity works in real life.
For business builders like you at this early, uncertain stage of thinking, I have developed a coaching offering customized to your company, concerns, aspirations, opportunities and constraints to help you get from where you are to where you might someday like to be. The program is structured to permit you to learn any topic of interest at your speed, meeting you at your level of sophistication. You may set up additional sessions keyed to those among your staff who might be key contributors to the success of certain pathways and who will be differentially impacted by the route chosen. In this evaluation and learning stage, we jointly determine each month's syllabus and structure the interaction frequency to accomplish the learning objectives.
Below is a flow chart we made for you outlining what is required to move from the vague (where you presumably are, collectively) to the specific (a resolved transaction development path, irrespective of pacing). You will start this now because the more time you have to prepare (as I will show you how) for any strategic financial transaction, the better your result will be upon execution. Your ROI on this evaluation evolution is the highest you will get from ANY financial service because it makes the biggest difference in outcome whenever you elect to execute ANY transaction that pivots off the equity value a counterparty will recognize.
To begin with, you need to decide on your strategic financial objectives. After surveying your company’s qualifications for transactions that might work, you will know what preparatory steps to take to maximize your equity value in the context of your selected pathway. Then, you will need the time to accomplish those steps you believe are worthwhile.
Selected KANE Transactions