close icon
alert icon
COVID-19: Nash Advisory support for your business COVID-19 response.

About Us

Our diligence sets us apart from the competition.

See more about us

Services

Our team are experts in a range of services. Whatever your business goals happen to be, we can help you achieve them.

See all services

Insights

From business sales to strategy, we help our clients grow with a personalised approach and outcome-driven attitude.

What percentage of our clients achieve a successful sale? And if unsuccessful, why?

See all articlesSuccessful sale
Selling a business
By
Sean O'Neill
Sean O'Neill
Managing Director
December 6, 2023
5
minute read

81% - that is our current internal metric over the past 4 years across more than $2 billion in transaction value.

Mergers and acquisitions advice is a low volume, high touchpoint service where millions of dollars are in the balance for clients and shareholders.

At Nash Advisory we take on approximately 10-12 sell side clients per year, aiming to maximise sales proceeds to the shareholders and limit their legal and financial risks in a transaction.

With good planning and preparation, combined with running a strict sale process we achieve a success rate of over 80% at Nash. We have found that there are three main reasons why a transaction will not be successful:

  • Client gets starry eyed: There are reasonable offers for the business based on market based valuation metrics and market conditions, but a client decides that their business is worth more than the offers received. Often a client may increase their value expectations between starting the engagement and receiving offers.
  • Underperforming business: The performance of a client's business is trending downwards during the sale process, making it difficult to agree a valuation between buyer and seller.
  • Low interest: In some instances, there are no offers received for the business after an active marketing campaign. In our experience this occurs in 6% of transactions. The key reason is that the client was extremely unique in their sector and product; or that they had experienced a significant improvement in performance and bidders were uncertain whether that performance was sustainable in the long term.

A key factor in why our success rate is above 80% is that we will thoroughly evaluate new clients against the above three factors, before committing to a sale process. We often decline mandates when we do not believe the Vendor has a reasonable value expectation or the business is not what it seems. On average, we invest 1,000 hours in completing a sale process, so we must be confident that a process will lead to a successful transaction.

In conclusion, by following our Nash methodology there is a high likelihood of achieving a successful outcome. Planning and preparation, combined with running a strict and exhaustive sales process should achieve a strong result.

Related articles

Powered by EngineRoom