Bringing middle market investment banking best practices to the lower middle market.
LaGrey was founded by senior level legal and financial professionals with a combined 40 years of legal, finance, operations, private equity and M&A experience. Our sister company is one of the top 100 most referred middle-market advisory firms in the US according to an Axial Survey. LaGrey has adapted their processes, best practices, and frameworks within our practice offering best in class professional advisory services to the lower middle market.
We go well beyond listing your business on a website or relying on a shot-gun approach to market and monetize your project. Our thoughtful, focused, collaborative and confidential process optimizes transitions from acquisition through growth to eventual sale.
Sell Side Advisory
Confidential, efficient, and proven M&A advisory processes.
LaGrey offers sell-side M&A advisory services to a broad range of clients across industries.
These transactions all accomplish the same goal of providing liquidity and freedom to business owners, but each transaction process can follow a different path. Our team has the knowledge and employs comprehensive processes to maximize value and effectively navigate the challenges involved in a business transition. Our proven process mitigates business and personal disruptions that are common when selling your company. We take charge of the process from day one, engage with your trusted advisors, and do the heavy lifting, so you can continue to focus on operating your business.
LaGrey’s proven 5 step process for a successful sell-side transition:
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Prior to beginning our engagement, we spend time with you to understand the goals you have with the transition and gather financial and operational details about your business. We use this information to prepare a comprehensive report that includes a market-based business valuation, preliminary research on potential buyers, project timelines, an estimate of the range of financial outcomes and an overview of the transaction process to ensure alignment.
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Once engaged, we organize a kick-off meeting to go deeper into the organization to gain an even more comprehensive understanding of your organization. We establish a project team, define the roles of your other advisors, and begin a comprehensive diligence process to gather all the information a buyer typically requests before the project goes to market.
Our team uses this information to prepare a professional and comprehensive marketing package for your business. We then prepare and obtain approval of proprietary buyer lists developed from our extensive database and finalize the marketing strategy. We meet weekly with you to keep you up to date on the status of the project.
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Our confidential outreach process begins with initial contact and discussions with the buyer list. We hold diligence calls with buyers, field information requests, gather, and evaluate indications of interest and meet with you weekly to keep you appraised of our progress and review marketing KPIs.
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Our analysts will prepare a comprehensive report to compare interested parties and our senior advisors will work with you to select the top buyer groups to attend management presentations. We then prepare a comprehensive management presentation package, prepare you and your team for potential questions, and coordinate the presentations.
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We then work with the buyers to secure and evaluate multiple letters of intent and negotiate the best offer with the leading parties. Once signed, we coordinate all the remaining diligence activates, lead negotiations, coordinate legal and close the transaction.
Buy Side Service
Streamlined and effective acquisition strategies to achieve your goals
We support our clients by identifying investment opportunities that drive value far beyond standard methods.
Leveraging our knowledge in the M&A market and utilizing a variety of exclusive research methods, LaGrey has the toolkit to get the job done. Our clients acquire companies for many reasons, whether they want to build a portfolio, expand into new markets or geography, or achieve growth goals.
We support our clients by helping them document their investment thesis, develop an acquisition strategy and identify investment opportunities that drive value far beyond standard methods. Our transparent process provides clients with a clear line of sight to our progress. Our knowledge of the mergers and acquisitions market, and exclusive research methods increases our success rate.
LaGrey’s proven 4 step process for a successful buy-side transaction:
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Prior to beginning our engagement, we spend time with you to understand the goals of your acquisition strategy and gather financial and operational details about your business. We use this information to prepare a preliminary report that includes an outline of the project goals, research to define the number of targets, market-based valuation ranges and a feasibility assessment of the project. This helps ensure alignment with our clients prior to the engagement.
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Once engaged, LaGrey’s senior team, will work with your management team to develop and refine your investment thesis, align diligence processes with the identified value creation levers, develop financial models to evaluate the transactions and analyze the accretive value of a completed transaction. Our analysists will develop a comprehensive acquisition target list as well as marketing materials that highlight the benefits of a business combination with your organization.
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As your representative, our team conducts marketing efforts professionally and efficiently using proven methods of outreach to determine interest. We utilize a proprietary CRM system and secure data rooms to create a frictionless process when working with prospective targets. We facilitate a weekly meeting with your team to report on our marketing efforts, review the status of all active negotiations, provide preliminary diligence updates, and refine our messaging as needed. As interest builds within our target list, we coordinate all site visits and calls between our client and the target.
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After finding common ground with a target, our team will conduct preliminary diligence to validate the value creation assumptions and negotiate an LOI. Upon execution of the LOI, we focus on deal leadership, coordination of legal diligence and project management of the transaction to ensure costs are managed and negotiations and documents are on track. We can also work closely with all parties to develop and implement our proven integration frameworks.
