Buying a business: what to expect – a buyer’s guide to the process
A company may decide to acquire another business for a variety of reasons, including the elimination of a competitor from the market, a strategic desire to obtain control over an element of its supply chain, to achieve economies of scale, to expand a group’s existing operations into a new field or to enable it to take advantage of available tax losses in the target company.
A guide to buying a business
For an incumbent management team, the opportunity to buy-out the business in which they work can arise because the existing owners want to retire or realise all or part of their investment, thereby providing an opportunity for the management team to become business owners.
The guide outlines various considerations that might be relevant (other than tax considerations – which, except for what is said about stamp duty, are outside of its scope) and what can be expected at each stage of the process.
This guide doesn’t deal with acquisitions of public companies – which, in the case of companies that are not publicly traded, may be carried out in much the same way as a private company acquisition (but there would be additional steps at the outset to dis-apply some of the legal provisions that otherwise govern public company acquisitions).
Insofar as this guide relates to management buy-outs, its focus is on smaller equity- or debt-funded buy-outs by incumbent management teams rather than larger, institutionally-led buy-outs (or buy-ins), where the acquisition process is typically led by the private equity investor rather than the management team.
Download our guide
This guide relates to acquisitions of private companies or their businesses and assets and it is intended for:
Key contact
Keep exploring
Contact us
If you’d like to speak to a member of our team, please fill out the enquiry form.
If you need to speak to someone soon, call: