[einarvollset]

I do deals a fair bit larger than this, and so am obviously biased, but while this sounds appealing, the fact is that only once or twice out of the couple of dozen times I’ve heard back from founders that decided to DIY their M&A have I not thought to myself “you got taken to the cleaners”.

The buyers on the other side are professional buyers. They get promoted by buying great companies for as little as possible. Most founders will only ever sell one business, if that. Buyers don’t care about their reputation with you, they do care about their reputation with a banker they may interact with multiple times.

[wjnc]

Agree with this. Been on quite large deal teams in non-tech. We always made fun of the lawyers and merchant banks. They bring dozens of teens to do chores, sit in on meetings where serious business is conducted (best one was 2x4 people talking in a room with 60! people in silence in Teams) and generally do nothing that is of any value to us serious business people considering the deal. At the end of the period where we’ve worked our asses of creating possible avenues of value, both the contracts and financial arrangements materialize out of thin air. This is boring paperwork of course, so we keep on joking about the absence of value added and the fact that we pay them hundreds to thousands of euros per hour to get us coffee. (This started out as a cynical post, but this is I think how it is. They add unseen value, transactions are closed without legal and financial snags, and we deal-makers should be thankful for that. You can’t spend a week pissing on commas in a contract if someone hasn’t written it first.)