Mergers & Acquisitions For Dummies

Introduction

In every job — whether it be sales, managing retail establishments, raising capital, crunching numbers, writing, working with venture capitalists, creating online ventures, or working investment banking deals (I’ve done all these, by the way) — you quickly discover that you need a whole new set of rules, lingo, conventions, and nomenclature. And more often than not, what you need to know to excel at your job can be distilled into just a few salient points. If you’re lucky, you bump into a wise old sage who, upon experiencing your questioning, utterly confused face, and dispirited body language, simply says, “Forget all that other stuff; here’s what you really need to know.” Enter Mergers & Acquisitions For Dummies, an inside look at the process of buying and selling companies.

Although companies change hands every day, buying and selling can mean many things and take many forms. Who or what is the Buyer or Seller? What kind of transaction is it? How will the Buyer finance the deal, and what does the Seller receive? These are only a few of the considerations in any given mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deal. It’s so confusing!

As a result, business owners, some of the main participants in M&A, are often completely befuddled when the time comes to sell their businesses or make acquisitions. They don’t know anything about M&A because they’ve been focused on their own businesses and not on the business of buying and selling companies.

That’s why I wrote this book — to ...