I’m Paul Reilly, Partner at New Direction Partners.  If you’re thinking of selling your business, I would highly recommend at the beginning of the process, maybe one to two years before you’re thinking of selling you come and talk to an investment adviser.  I like it to be New Direction Partners but I highly recommend that you high somebody to help you through that process.

Two years before you will think about the decisions you’ll be making and how you will present your company two years from now.  You’ll be looking at what investments you make.  You’ll be looking at who’s running your business.  You want to plan for this because you only have one opportunity in your life to do it.  When you do make the decision it’s time to sell it, you have to get in front of the right people.  It’s just not your friends.  It’s not just the friends of your accountant or your friends of the lawyer.

There are many people, surprisingly who will buy your business.  In fact, in the beginning of every engagement we’ll go through and make a list and we’ll work with our client.  Here are the people we think would be interested in your company.  Only 50 percent of the time is a person on that list that successfully buys a company.  We go through the process and we talked to people, we find other people that may be interested and half of the time they’re the people that will buy your company.  And you only have one opportunity so my advice hire and advisor.

Buying a company is a very important process and again it’s may be not just your friends who you want to buy.  I’d highly recommend that you talk to an investment banker who understands the business.  They’re out there everyday.  We’re talking to people.  We know who’s looking to buy.  We know who’s looking to sell.  We also know people that are talking about selling but are not really sellers, they like to talk.  But they don’t really have a intention of selling.  Getting to the right people, making sure that your phone call is answered is part of the process that we have.

We also have with our partnership with WhatTheyThink a great resource.  Thousands of people come to the NMA, WhatTheyThink site, everyday.  And on there there’s a listing of people, some of who are looking to buy.  Some are looking to sell.  That is a great resource and our deal flow has never been as high as it is now because we’re generating a significant amount of interest in NMA activity, both buyers and sellers when they come to the WhatTheyThink site.