Hainstock: Business sale preparation should start six to twelve months before listing
John Hainstock · Episode 672 | Bootstrapping, Building, Buying, and Selling SaaS C... · Aug 1, 2023 · at 28:36
Jon Hainstock, M&A advisor at Quiet Light, explains why M&A advisory involves substantive pre-sale preparation well ahead of taking a company to market.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There's a lot of things that go into that, that, that do look more like an advisor, you know, trying to prepare your business for sale before you sell, right? Not just at the moment that you are going to market, but like six months, a year in advance what should you be thinking about and all those types of things.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from John Hainstock
Hainstock: Mature bootstrappers face a choice between aggressive reinvestment and exiting
“I find a lot of other folks that I speak with now kind of getting to that point where it's either doubled on what we're doing and what's working and invest a lot more resource into it. Take less profit, build a team, invest, and kind of assume that risk yourse…”
Hainstock: $20K–$40K assets offer sweet spot for acquisition entrepreneurship
“I think it's a great way to test out
Entrepreneurship through acquisition.
It's kind of in that, you know, 2030, 40 K range is a great sweet spot to find something.”
Hainstock: Buyers of small cash-flow acquisitions effectively get the codebase for free
“I think one of the big benefits too, that a lot of people may miss is that you were essentially buying cash flows. And so you're getting the code, you're getting the product, the marketing kind of Base of it for free in a sense, because you're buying a multipl…”
Hainstock: ZoomShift had six-figure revenue, low churn, and profitability when sold in 2020
“Yeah, so we were profitable. We were both working full-time on it. We had a full-time customer support person doing six figures in, in revenue, and things were really pretty stable overall. Churn was low. Growth was like slow but steady.”