Selling Your Business

In today's volatile and disruptive environment, business owners must adapt and strategise. Sometimes, this means preparing to sell. We can guide you through every step of the selling process to ensure a successful transition.

When a business is for sale, or selling off a part, it needs to spend time preparing itself. It needs to demonstrate its commercial and financial strength to potential buyers.

The sale process needs to be carefully managed to ensure that all the right buyers are aware of the opportunity. The relevant information needs to be made available to potential purchasers in a controlled way. And to maximise the value of the business, competitive tension between potential buyers needs to be maintained.

Our expert team helps businesses through every stage of the sale cycle and advise them on the right strategies.

Supporting you from strategy to disposal

Business sale processes are often complex and time consuming, involving managing the expectations and needs of key stakeholders. We have the expertise and experience to support you.

Realigning your business portfolio
What is my business worth now and in the future?
Determining what is actually for sale
Stand-alone financial information for the business
Separation Planning

Realigning your business portfolio

As markets become increasingly challenging and companies pursue their growth and innovation goals, divestitures can offer strong, strategic benefits. How do you know if, and when, it's the right choice and the right time?

Organisations need to critically assess their existing business and their portfolios of assets. They need to consider:

Is the financial return sufficient and enhancing the overall group return or diluting it?

Is the business or division part of the core offering or its future direction?

Are you the right people to manage the business through future challenges and maximise growth opportunities?

What is my business worth now and in the future?

In assessing your sale options, consider what the business is worth today and what actions can be taken to prepare it for future divestment. You need the opportunity to identify value critical issues and have the option to "regroup and fix" them outside the glare of a sale process. There may also be opportunities around commercial or operational initiatives, as well as working capital optimisation, which will create value in a future divestment.

Determining what is actually for sale

If you have decided to sell part of your business, determining which assets form part of the transaction can prove more difficult than expected. Frequently, some physical assets as well as staff are shared among multiple business units but are often housed in one legal entity. Deciding which assets and people stay with the parent business and which ones go with the sale can be complicated and expensive.

Stand-alone financial information for the business

Key to a successful transaction is robust stand-alone financial information for the business being sold. While P&L information is often available by division, divisional balance sheets, cash flows and working capital profiles may not be available. It can be a difficult and cumbersome exercise to extract this information. Consideration also needs to be given to additional costs the business may incur once it splits out from the parent. This could include back office costs, new management team or procurement dis-synergies.

Separation Planning

Divestitures are complex and the separation plan needs to consider the needs of suppliers, customers and employees. Ignoring these key stakeholders can have negative impacts on the deal itself and the retained business. Transitional service agreements (TSAs) may be necessary, which require time, effort and negotiations to set up.

Our business sales services

Divestiture strategy
Valuations
Carve out financial statements
Vendor due diligence
Operational readiness

Divestiture strategy

From portfolio assessment to discovering value in separating entities, our team can assist you in assessing your disposal options and advising on the best strategy to adopt. Our knowledge and experience maximises value while you focus on managing your business.

Our services include:

Detailed company and market assessment
Identification of potentially interested parties
Managing the sales process or negotiations on your behalf

Valuations

Having a clear expectation of current value and the potential value creation opportunities for you and potential buyers is critical. Our valuations team can perform a valuation of your asset or business, highlight the key value drivers and potential levers which would drive higher future value.

Carve out financial statements

Developing the right GAAP carve-out financial statements to support an IPO, spin-off or sale transaction is vital as the deal process unfolds. Any doubts around the robustness of those statements will impact on the value of the deal.

From defining the appropriate documentation to putting together support staff, our team's strong operational and industry expertise helps guide a smooth transaction, regardless of buyer requirements.

Vendor due diligence

Comprehensive due diligence is key to any transaction. Vendor due diligence has become a highly valued component in the M&A process. It provides comfort to both buyers and sellers, giving an independent view of the business.

It adds credibility to the facts, figures and information provided in the sales memorandum and reduces the burden of going through multiple exhaustive buyer due diligence processes.

It also gives you knowledge, control of information and the ability to identify, address and comment on risk areas before a buyer raises them.

Our team of experienced functional and industry experts will identify the issues relevant for a buyer to help guide a smooth transaction.

Operational readiness

Our team of functional and industry experts can help you with your separation planning. We can help with separation cost analysis through 'Day-one Readiness planning' and TSAs.

We can help you assess stand-alone, one-time, and stranded costs. We provide scenarios that can increase the value of the carve-out business, and reduce transaction and restructuring costs.

We can provide functional and PMO expertise to coordinate enterprise-wide divestiture efforts, manage dependencies and resolve issues. We support the deal team and executive management with prioritising activities and balancing resources.