The S+P’s approach to help me, coupled with their ability to listen to what I needed was such a refreshing idea that it was hard to believe at first. As we worked together over the months that followed, it became obvious that they were concerned about my welfare.
Business Owner/Founder at Utility Construction Services Business
Southeastern United States
Why choose S+P?
Focused Attention
We understand that not every partnership is a perfect fit and work diligently to assess if we are the right match for your company. Our goal is to ensure that everyone involved is aligned, telling the same story, and ready for every stage of the transaction.
Confidentiality
We treat confidentiality as paramount in any business sale and understand the significance that your team, customers, reputation, and performance have on your company’s value. That’s why we handle every facet of the transaction with the highest level of discretion.
Integrity
Our values and skills are clear-cut: Grit, High Motor, Accountability, and Self Awareness. We build lasting relationships with our clients, often starting before a transaction and continuing long after it’s completed.
Structured & Proven Process
With almost 40 years of combined deal experience, we’ve developed a structured process that streamlines your business sale, minimizing stress and maximizing value for you and your shareholders.
Marketing Expertise
We create customized marketing materials that highlight your strengths, growth potential, and industry position. We immerse ourselves in your industry, becoming experts before going to market, effectively driving motivated buyer activity.
Seamless Transaction Management
Our extensive experience helps us anticipate potential pitfalls and roadblocks, helping you to stay ahead of the transaction timeline. We also manage the emotional aspects of the deal, ensuring a smooth transition post-closing.
Business Brokerage Services
The lower middle market, businesses up to $100m in enterprise value, includes a diverse and varied range of companies from generational family manufacturing operations to innovative tech advanced software development firms. Although highly fragmented, the lower middle market is the spine and nerve center of the U.S. economy. The lower middle market is home to 350,000+ U.S. based businesses and employs more Americans than any other market segment.
- process
- Dealmaking
- working with us
Business Brokerage Excellence
Finding Potential Buyers and Sellers
Companies and firms in the lower middle market, from industrial plumbing contractors to multi-location furniture wholesalers and distributors offer strategic buyers, who are already in the industry, an opportunity to cultivate market share via acquisition versus the slow, uncertain, and costly expense of organic growth. Via acquisition, strategic buyers immediately add top line revenue and bottom-line profitability to their financial statement. In addition, they’re able to add ancillary services and product lines, immediate new customer base, streamline operational expenses, negotiate cost effective rates of fixed expenses, and in some cases reach new geographies and expand access to new resources.
Besides capital for growth, investment partners bring access to their relationships with professional resources and networks of customers, clients, suppliers, lenders, and infrastructure upgrades. The quality of available resources improves immediately.
Due Diligence
Taking a business to market requires dedicated planning that is specific in its objective. We’re answering several questions that will come up during the marketing and transactional phase of an M&A transaction before we ever go to market. We want to make sure your business entities are in the best shape to generate the best price and terms for you and your shareholders.
We prepare business owners for transactional due diligence long before the transaction begins. The transaction diligence process is exhaustive. It’s your business’ story and an accounting of its past, it’s present, and it’s potential future. We work to gather a significant percentage of information potential buyers will ask for during a transactional process well before we ever meet those buyers. The more information we collect early, the fewer problems we experience as we move towards closing.
Setting Fair Market Value
Business valuation consists of multiple variables and every business owner should know what their businesses are worth for a myriad of reasons. It’s a baseline from which all other opportunity develops. We provide detailed metrics based on your empirical data, recent comparable sales, and a series of industry metrics defined by folks in your trade. In addition, we’ll work with you to develop a “range of value,” along with proper forecasting, determining critical metrics for growth, and identifying any missing key business components.
We then work to create a controlled environment where we engage multiple & targeted buyer prospects simultaneously while offering some of our listings via “Market Value” pricing. We want to bring a carefully curated list of qualified buyer prospects to the conversation early and we never stop negotiating on your behalf.
Services at and After Making the Deal
Linking Financial and Legal Professionals
The best legal documents are the ones you sign, put on a shelf, and never look at again. We work to align our clients with the best legal minds for M&A transactions in the U.S. who understand our streamlined transactional objectives for legal documentation, in addition to the emotional toil the process will create for the seller. We expect thoroughness and efficiency which eliminate unnecessary obstacles on the way to closing and transition.
Lending options continue to tighten given inflation’s unpredictable volatility. Increased labor and vendor costs linger and continually compress profit margins. Lack of access to cost effective capital will limit business owner’s ability to re-invest and grow. Unless business owners are content with battening down the hatches and waiting out stretches of economic ebb and flow, they can look to alternative and innovative growth strategies. This is where M&A is a powerful tool for business owners to create lucrative re-capitalizations and long-term generational wealth.
Potential buyers can rely on our team to make introductions with world class lenders who specifically work on business transactions every day. Not all lenders are created equal and having an international banking presence does not mean they can get your transaction closed. Great lenders understand and manage personalities well. On occasion, they’re part time psychologists who’ll lend an ear during the most challenging transactional experiences. It’s not an easy task to buy or sell a business at any price point. There are variables, moving parts, and a lot of unknowns that get answered as we work through the process. We work diligently to make sure everyone involved in your transaction are highly skilled, empathetic, efficient, and professional.
Closing Oversight
Picking the right buyer is difficult, especially if you have multiple suitors in play at the same time. The highest price isn’t always the best bet in the context of total seller benefit. We’ve closed dozens of transactions where the highest price didn’t win. We educate business owners up front to pay close attention to good cultural matches. Ask yourself when you meet potential buyers if you can see yourself working with this group every day for a prescribed period of time post-closing. Do you share similar value systems? What’s their historical track record of retaining org charts, building out infrastructure, etc.? What do their platform groups or previous holdings say about them now?
At S+P Capital Partners we’ll go through what to expect and what questions to ask. Does the potential buyer appreciate what it took you and your team to build this operation? Can they lay out their vision for business transition and long-term growth opportunities? Have they built a strong balance sheet and a consistent performance record? Our team at S+P Capital Partners will take the guesswork out of the conversation and help create foundational solutions to maximize your business value prior to and at the transaction close.
Why Work With S&P Capital Partners?
Market Knowledge
We have access to the most advanced research tools in our industry and we know the metrics that maximize a seller’s total benefit. We’re experienced in just about every industry and will be the resident experts on your business, and your industry, by the time we go to market.
Skilled Professionals
Investment bankers must understand deal mechanics and nuance. You can’t have one without the other. The mechanics are black and white blocking and tackling. Nuance separates the most talented investment bankers from the masses. We understand the emotional ebb and flow this process will create and what obstacles are in our path. We’ll guide you and walk side by side from before the beginning to well after our mission is complete.
Industry Experience
Real world deal experience. We’ve spent the last 25+ years incrementally improving our processes while working on hundreds of sell side transactions in just about every industry.
Process Driven Outcomes
We’ve developed very specific and customized deal processes in every industry we’ve completed transactions. We don’t offer a cookie cutter assembly line process. Our team creates bespoke processes from valuation, to marketing, to acquisition target identification, to transaction, to close, and beyond. We don’t take shortcuts, we’re diligent and persistent, and our process is transparent from the very start.
Investment Criteria
S+P Capital Partners offers investment banking services, specifically sell-side advisory services to privately held businesses and business owners. We deliver efficient, trustworthy, and experienced Merger and Acquisition services to businesses with up to $150 million in enterprise value. With nearly 40 years of deep-learned, real world deal experience, we understand how transactions work before they start through after they close.
$1m+
Target SDC
<$150m
Target Revenue
15+
Employees
Selling a business is stressful under the best of conditions and the way you managed the process kept my stress low. You handled delicate situations with grace and made the whole process occur far quicker than I had ever imagined.
Business Owner/Founder at Recycling Plant & Materials Recovery Facility
Southeastern United States