The two airlines will continue to operate separately until mid 2012.

The following is an update on where things stand since United Continental Holding took over both airlines last October:

• Kiosks at 83 airports started allowing travelers to check in for flights on either airline on May 18th.
• United’s old logo at Chicago O’Hare Airport has been replaced by United’s name with Continental’s globe symbol.  This change is progressing at all airports.
• United offers coach seats with extra legroom for which it charges a premium.  “Economy Plus” seats are not expected to be sold on Continental planes until early 2012.
• United has announced that it will retain United’s three classes of service for international flights and Continental’s two classes of service for at least the next several years.
• The airline hopes to offer a combined reservations system (based on Continental’s current system) by March 2012.
• Frequent fliers can link their United and Continental accounts and combine miles.
• Travelers can check out flights, receive seat assignments and check flight status on either United or Continental’s website regardless of which airline they are flying.
• Both airlines started offering the same menu for on board food purchases in coach as of May 1st, although the menus for business class remain different.
• Baggage charges, flight changes, standby requests, and the handling of unaccompanied minors are now identical between the two airlines.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

www.cheapfares.com employees enjoy writing and sharing travel news articles that engage them and believe others will find interesting.

1. Identity. Confirm in writing exactly who is involved in the joint venture.

2. NDA. Do you need a Non Disclosure Agreement to be signed? (typically if one party has a great idea, and the other will be involved with manufacture or promotion).

3. What are the responsibilities of each party? List in writing what each of you will bring to the ‘party’.

4. Is the enterprise global, or limited in geographical scope?

5. Are there any legal considerations related to setting up the business (are licenses required from the Government etc)

6. Structure of the joint venture. Is it a partnership or a Company, or simply a JV contract between 2 parties? If it is a company, who sits on the board and how are they appointed? What classes of shares are in circulation, and under what conditions? How are minority shareholders protected?

7. Financing. Who supplies the capital for the venture? Is it split in some way between the Joint Venture parties or does it come from an outside source, such as a Bank or venture capital firm? Is the investment in cash or goods or services?

8. If a Company structure is to be used, what exit provisions are needed? For example, if one side wanted to sell their shares, what conditions apply? Will the other party have first refusal to buy? Can they also demand to be bought out at the same time? How is a shareholding to be valued? Will new incoming shareholders have the same rights and responsibilities as the existing shareholders? Is there a right of veto?

9. Non competition. Will the parties to the venture be prohibited from competing directly with the new business? Is it restricted territorially?

10. Sharing of information. What rights do the partners have to know about the internal workings of the venture? Are regular management accounts to be provided? For example, would www.lawyersbench.com have rights to a product developed by a JV partner, even if we had no direct involvement in the day-to-day running of the venture? What about independent auditing?

11. Profit sharing. How are profits to be distributed? When? Under what conditions? Can one party force a distribution of profits?

12. IPR. What Intellectual Property Rights will the new venture acquire? DO they revert to any particular party if the venture is dissolved? Who owns new IPR developed by the venture?

13. Employees. How many employees will be needed, and how will they be organized? Will there be share options, or other incentives? Transferring employees from one business to another will almost certainly involve you in taking legal advice on the process and the related employee rights. At www.lawyersbench.com we would always have relevant ‘key-man’ insurance policies in place for special employees.

14. Administration. Map out who manages the venture, who the bankers will be, who will audit the business and who is responsible for regulatory compliance?

15. Exit. Does the venture have a defined life-span, or is it open-ended? What circumstances can force it to end prematurely? If this happens, how are the assets to be distributed (including cash and IPR). If there are liabilities, not assets, who do they devolve onto?

If you answer all these points adequately, you should be well on the way to a sensible well structured joint venture. As always, take legal advice before committing to any legal arrangement.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

You are about to learn one of the most powerful tools I know of for being successful in today’s competitive business atmosphere. I’m of course talking about Joint Ventures, or specifically, teaming up with another person, group of persons, or business entity for the purpose of expanding your business influence and creating a more powerful market presence you can visit joint-venture-guide dot com. Joint Ventures are in, and if you’re not utilizing this strategic weapon, chances are your competition is, or will soon be, using this to their advantage…. possibly against you! Our primary goal is to make you a successful joint venture. This will happen if you are an informed entrepreneur.

Thus, it is necessary for us to dive into the technical aspects of joint ventures. Specifically: A joint venture is a strategic alliance where two or more parties, usually businesses, form a partnership to share markets, intellectual property, assets, knowledge, and, of course, profits. A joint venture differs from a merger in the sense that there is no transfer of ownership in the deal. This partnership can happen between goliaths in an industry. Singular, for instance, is a strategic alliance between SBS and Bellsouth. It can also occur between two small businesses that believe partnering will help them successfully fight their bigger competitors.

Companies with identical products and services can also join forces to penetrate markets they wouldn’t or couldn’t consider without investing tremendous resources. Furthermore, due to local regulations, some markets can only be penetrated via joint venturing with a local business or visit joint-venture-softwares dot com In some cases, a large company can decide to form a joint venture with a smaller business in order to quickly acquire critical intellectual property, technology, or resources otherwise hard to obtain, even with plenty of cash at their disposal.

The process of partnering is a well-known, time-tested principle. The critical aspect of a joint venture does not lie in the process itself but in its execution. We all know what needs to be done: specifically, it is necessary to join forces. However, it is easy to overlook the “haws” and “whets” in the excitement of the moment. For the help www.joint-venture-guide.com. We will look at the “haws” in our review of the Eight Critical Factors of Success. For the moment, let’s keep in mind that all mergers, large or small, need to be planned in detail and executed following a strict plan in order to keep all the chances of success on your side.

The “whets” should be covered in a legal agreement that will carefully list which party brings which assets (tangible and intangible) to the joint venture, as well as the objective of this strategic alliance. Joint venture legal agreement templates can readily be found on the Internet. You can also seek the appropriate legal advice when entering such a business relationship.

www.easy-jv-manager.com www.jointwebventures.com

Acquisition
An acquisition,(the ‘target’) by another. Consolidation is when two companies combine together to form a new company altogether. An acquisition may be private or public, depending on whether the acquiree or merging company is or isn’t listed in public markets. An acquisition may be friendly or hostile. Whether a purchase is perceived as a friendly or hostile depends on how it is communicated to and received by the target company’s board of directors, employees and shareholders. It is quite normal though for M&A deal communications to take place in a so called ‘confidentiality bubble’ whereby information flows are restricted due to confidentiality agreements (Harwood, 2005). In the case of a friendly transaction, the companies cooperate in negotiations; in the case of a hostile deal, the takeover target is unwilling to be bought or the target’s board has no prior knowledge of the offer. Hostile acquisitions can, and often do, turn friendly at the end, as the acquiror secures the endorsement of the transaction from the board of the acquiree company. This usually requires an improvement in the terms of the offer. Acquisition usually refers to a purchase of a smaller firm by a larger one. Sometimes, however, a smaller firm will acquire management control of a larger or longer established company and keep its name for the combined entity. This is known as a reverse takeover. Another type of acquisition is reverse merger, a deal that enables a private company to get publicly listed in a short time period. A reverse merger occurs when a private company that has strong prospects and is eager to raise financing buys a publicly listed shell company, usually one with no business and limited assets. Achieving acquisition success has proven to be very difficult, while various studies have shown that 50% of acquisitions were unsuccessful. The acquisition process is very complex, with many dimensions influencing its outcome. There is also a variety of structures used in securing control over the assets of a company, which have different tax and regulatory implications:

* The buyer buys the shares, and therefore control, of the target company being purchased. Ownership control of the company in turn conveys effective control over the assets of the company, but since the company is acquired intact as a going concern, this form of transaction carries with it all of the liabilities accrued by that business over its past and all of the risks that company faces in its commercial environment.
* The buyer buys the assets of the target company. The cash the target receives from the sell-off is paid back to its shareholders by dividend or through liquidation. This type of transaction leaves the target company as an empty shell, if the buyer buys out the entire assets. A buyer often structures the transaction as an asset purchase to “cherry-pick” the assets that it wants and leave out the assets and liabilities that it does not. This can be particularly important where foreseeable liabilities may include future, unquantified damage awards such as those that could arise from litigation over defective products, employee benefits or terminations, or environmental damage. A disadvantage of this structure is the tax that many jurisdictions, particularly outside the United States, impose on transfers of the individual assets, whereas stock transactions can frequently be structured as like-kind exchanges or other arrangements that are tax-free or tax-neutral, both to the buyer and to the seller’s shareholders.

The terms “demerger”, “spin-off” and “spin-out” are sometimes used to indicate a situation where one company splits into two, generating a second company separately listed on a stock exchange.
Distinction between mergers and acquisitions

Although often used synonymously, the terms merger and acquisition mean slightly different things. When one company takes over another and clearly establishes itself as the new owner, the purchase is called an acquisition. From a legal point of view, the target company ceases to exist, the buyer “swallows” the business and the buyer’s stock continues to be traded.

In the pure sense of the term, a merger happens when two firms agree to go forward as a single new company rather than remain separately owned and operated. This kind of action is more precisely referred to as a “merger of equals”. The firms are often of about the same size. Both companies’ stocks are surrendered and new company stock is issued in its place. For example, in the 1999 merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, both firms ceased to exist when they merged, and a new company, GlaxoSmithKline, was created.

In practice, however, actual mergers of equals don’t happen very often. Usually, one company will buy another and, as part of the deal’s terms, simply allow the acquired firm to proclaim that the action is a merger of equals, even if it is technically an acquisition. Being bought out often carries negative connotations, therefore, by describing the deal euphemistically as a merger, deal makers and top managers try to make the takeover more palatable. An example of this would be the takeover of Chrysler by Daimler-Benz in 1999 which was widely referred to as a merger at the time.

A purchase deal will also be called a merger when both CEOs agree that joining together is in the best interest of both of their companies. But when the deal is unfriendly (that is, when the target company does not want to be purchased) it is always regarded as an acquisition.

Business valuation

The five most common ways to valuate a business are

* asset valuation,
* historical earnings valuation,
* future maintainable earnings valuation,
* relative valuation (comparable company & comparable transactions),
* discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation

Professionals who valuate businesses generally do not use just one of these methods but a combination of some of them, as well as possibly others that are not mentioned above, in order to obtain a more accurate value. The information in the balance sheet or income statement is obtained by one of three accounting measures: a Notice to Reader, a Review Engagement or an Audit.

Accurate business valuation is one of the most important aspects of M&A as valuations like these will have a major impact on the price that a business will be sold for. Most often this information is expressed in a Letter of Opinion of Value (LOV) when the business is being valuated for interest’s sake. There are other, more detailed ways of expressing the value of a business. While these reports generally get more detailed and expensive as the size of a company increases, this is not always the case as there are many complicated industries which require more attention to detail, regardless of size.

Financing M&A

Mergers are generally differentiated from acquisitions partly by the way in which they are financed and partly by the relative size of the companies. Various methods of financing an M&A deal exist:

Cash

Payment by cash. Such transactions are usually termed acquisitions rather than mergers because the shareholders of the target company are removed from the picture and the target comes under the (indirect) control of the bidder’s shareholders.

Stock

Payment in the acquiring company’s stock, issued to the shareholders of the acquired company at a given ratio proportional to the valuation of the latter.

Specialist M&A advisory firms

Although at present the majority of M&A advice is provided by full-service investment banks, recent years have seen a rise in the prominence of specialist M&A advisers, who only provide M&A advice (and not financing). These companies are sometimes referred to as Transition companies, assisting businesses often referred to as “companies in transition.” To perform these services in the US, an advisor must be a licensed broker dealer, and subject to SEC (FINRA) regulation. More information on M&A advisory firms is provided at corporate advisory.

Motives behind M&A

The dominant rationale used to explain M&A activity is that acquiring firms seek improved financial performance. The following motives are considered to improve financial performance:

* Economy of scale: This refers to the fact that the combined company can often reduce its fixed costs by removing duplicate departments or operations, lowering the costs of the company relative to the same revenue stream, thus increasing profit margins.
* Economy of scope: This refers to the efficiencies primarily associated with demand-side changes, such as increasing or decreasing the scope of marketing and distribution, of different types of products.
* Increased revenue or market share: This assumes that the buyer will be absorbing a major competitor and thus increase its market power (by capturing increased market share) to set prices.
* Cross-selling: For example, a bank buying a stock broker could then sell its banking products to the stock broker’s customers, while the broker can sign up the bank’s customers for brokerage accounts. Or, a manufacturer can acquire and sell complementary products.
* Synergy: For example, managerial economies such as the increased opportunity of managerial specialization. Another example are purchasing economies due to increased order size and associated bulk-buying discounts.
* Taxation: A profitable company can buy a loss maker to use the target’s loss as their advantage by reducing their tax liability. In the United States and many other countries, rules are in place to limit the ability of profitable companies to “shop” for loss making companies, limiting the tax motive of an acquiring company. Tax minimization strategies include purchasing assets of a non-performing company and reducing current tax liability under the Tanner-White PLLC Troubled Asset Recovery Plan.
* Geographical or other diversification: This is designed to smooth the earnings results of a company, which over the long term smoothens the stock price of a company, giving conservative investors more confidence in investing in the company. However, this does not always deliver value to shareholders (see below).
* Resource transfer: resources are unevenly distributed across firms (Barney, 1991) and the interaction of target and acquiring firm resources can create value through either overcoming information asymmetry or by combining scarce resources.
* Vertical integration: Vertical integration occurs when an upstream and downstream firm merge (or one acquires the other). There are several reasons for this to occur. One reason is to internalise an externality problem. A common example is of such an externality is double marginalization. Double marginalization occurs when both the upstream and downstream firms have monopoly power, each firm reduces output from the competitive level to the monopoly level, creating two deadweight losses. By merging the vertically integrated firm can collect one deadweight loss by setting the downstream firm’s output to the competitive level. This increases profits and consumer surplus. A merger that creates a vertically integrated firm can be profitable.
* Absorption of similar businesses under single management: similar portfolio invested by two different mutual funds (Ahsan Raza Khan, 2009) namely united money market fund and united growth and income fund, caused the management to absorb united money market fund into united growth and income fund.

However, on average and across the most commonly studied variables, acquiring firms’ financial performance does not positively change as a function of their acquisition activity. Therefore, additional motives for merger and acquisition that may not add shareholder value include:

* Diversification: While this may hedge a company against a downturn in an individual industry it fails to deliver value, since it is possible for individual shareholders to achieve the same hedge by diversifying their portfolios at a much lower cost than those associated with a merger. (In his book One Up on Wall Street, Peter Lynch memorably termed this “diworseification”.)
* Manager’s hubris: manager’s overconfidence about expected synergies from M&A which results in overpayment for the target company.
* Empire-building: Managers have larger companies to manage and hence more power.
* Manager’s compensation: In the past, certain executive management teams had their payout based on the total amount of profit of the company, instead of the profit per share, which would give the team a perverse incentive to buy companies to increase the total profit while decreasing the profit per share (which hurts the owners of the company, the shareholders); although some empirical studies show that compensation is linked to profitability rather than mere profits of the company.

Effects on management

A study published in the July/August 2008 issue of the Journal of Business Strategy suggests that mergers and acquisitions destroy leadership continuity in target companies’ top management teams for at least a decade following a deal. The study found that target companies lose 21 percent of their executives each year for at least 10 years following an acquisition – more than double the turnover experienced in non-merged firms.[6] If the businesses of the acquired and acquiring companies overlap, then such turnover is to be expected; in other words, there can only be one CEO, CFO, etcetera at a time.

Short-run factors

One of the major short run factors that sparked in The Great Merger Movement was the desire to keep prices high. That is, with many firms in a market, supply of the product remains high. During the panic of 1893, the demand declined. When demand for the good falls, as illustrated by the classic supply and demand model, prices are driven down. To avoid this decline in prices, firms found it profitable to collude and manipulate supply to counter any changes in demand for the good. This type of cooperation led to widespread horizontal integration amongst firms of the era. Focusing on mass production allowed firms to reduce unit costs to a much lower rate. These firms usually were capital-intensive and had high fixed costs. Because new machines were mostly financed through bonds, interest payments on bonds were high followed by the panic of 1893, yet no firm was willing to accept quantity reduction during that period.

Long-run factors

In the long run, due to the desire to keep costs low, it was advantageous for firms to merge and reduce their transportation costs thus producing and transporting from one location rather than various sites of different companies as in the past. This resulted in shipment directly to market from this one location. In addition, technological changes prior to the merger movement within companies increased the efficient size of plants with capital intensive assembly lines allowing for economies of scale. Thus improved technology and transportation were forerunners to the Great Merger Movement. In part due to competitors as mentioned above, and in part due to the government, however, many of these initially successful mergers were eventually dismantled. The U.S. government passed the Sherman Act in 1890, setting rules against price fixing and monopolies. Starting in the 1890s with such cases as U.S. versus Addyston Pipe and Steel Co., the courts attacked large companies for strategizing with others or within their own companies to maximize profits. Price fixing with competitors created a greater incentive for companies to unite and merge under one name so that they were not competitors anymore and technically not price fixing.

Source: Multiple including Wikipedia

Increased Revenue

Certainly the main goal in forming a joint venture is to increase your revenue. By sharing resources, your partner and you hopefully can experience more revenue streams in one or both of the following ways:

Revenue Sharing – A joint venture may be one where products or services are combined and packaged for sale to clients and customers. A package deal of services or products could result in more sales, and thus, more revenue for you and your joint venture partner. Though you would be splitting a portion of sales, don’t think of it as a smaller percentage of profits, but a percentage of a much bigger piece of pie.

New Business – Your joint venture partnership could be using the talents and strengths of each other to increase each of your respective businesses. For example, you could be sharing your graphic design expertise to provide great brochures to your partner, while he gives you access to lead lists of potential customers. The result of this type of joint partnership is measured individually rather than combined.

New Networks

Your joint venture can lead to new networks of potential business partners and customers, which can benefit your business. It could bring your products or services to new channels of customers who otherwise would not know your business exist. Find ways to market to your partner’s mailing lists. Perhaps provide a free sample to your partner’s regular and loyal customers. But don’t forget to do the same for your partner. Promote his or her business to your current customers as well.

Your combined networks could also allow you to find other ways to improve your business with other joint ventures. You could find other affiliates or individuals with strengths that could result in another business relationship. This may take time and effort outside your joint venture purpose, but sharing your partner’s business contacts can be beneficial as well. Just be sure not to steal or sour any business relationship for your joint venture partner.

Joint Venture Case Example: Saving Money and Increasing Clients

As an example, John was a freelance writer who found that he could offer copywriting services to his joint partner, Michael, in exchange for free web hosting that Michael’s company provided. While working with Michael, John was introduced to Joyce, who was a CPA and performed Michael’s bookkeeping. John approached Joyce in a similar manner and offered his copywriting and promotional services in exchange for tax advice for his freelance business. Joyce agreed, and the result was increased business for both Michael and Joyce, while John saved heaps of money on accounting and web services.

Save Time and Money

Your joint venture is a way to combine efforts and resources. By doing so, you could save money on your own marketing budget if you share marketing costs. And you can save time by sharing the required tasks with your joint venture partner. Freeing up your time and money to focus on other ways to grow your business, or even to spend more time with family, can be one of the best benefits you enjoy.

Source: ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nonetheless, there are varied methods that a private business can use to appeal to the capital markets and attract capital. The most common is the IPO (Initial Public Offering). An IPO is when a previously closely held private company originally offers to sell its stock to the investing public.

When a closely held private business visits the requirements needed to do a reverse merger – sometimes called a reverse takeover – with a public shell company, it is as a means for entering the capital markets fast and perhaps giving the private company directors an exit strategy.

In the example above, the publicly traded company is referred to as a “shell,” since all that’s left of the original company is the corporate organization and trading ability.

In public shell reverse mergers the shareholders of a private company purchase control of the shell company, merging it with the private company. The shareholders of the private business get the greatest portion of the stock of the public shell corporation, thereby controlling its board of directors.

Of course, the specifics pertaining to a reverse merger are many, and possibly an overview of the character of a public shell reverse merger is a subject that should be broached with a experienced securities attorney with a deep knowledge of all the applicable Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules.

When contemplating a reverse merger with a shell company a multitude of items require a response. Crucial concepts take center stage, such as: AIM stock exchange, REIT formation, filing registration statements SB-1 and SB-2, rule 15c211, market makers, public float, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), form S-8 stock for company founders and directors, accredited investors, SEC accounting practices, strategic planning, investment banking, NASD broker/dealers, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The best going public advice should be sought before contemplating a reverse merger, since many CEO’s are inexperienced and not aware of the pitfalls of going public via a public shell reverse merger.

Some of the benefits from taking a privately held company public with a reverse merger are better ways to raise capital, since the multiple sources of capitalization are much greater versus what a private company can attract. Furthermore, if there is a high enough interest from the investing public, the investment outlook about the company increases it could provide a secondary market for the company’s stock issue. The company can also keep managers by offering stock options. The resulting public company’s securities can also be employed as currency for acquiring other businesses (Mergers and Acquisitions).

The numerous rewards of taking a private company public far offset the alternative of remaining a private concern. The cachet associated with a publicly traded corporation is a boon; the superior opportunities for raising capital for growth and expansion are perfect considerations for becoming a publicly traded company. Reverse mergers with public shell companies have a place among the many ways to take a company public.

Franklin A. Roberson is a reverse merger and corporate financial specialist with a long track record in the corporate financial services sector; get more information about Mr. Roberson and reverse mergers.

1. Resell Rights
Resell Rights let you sell a product and keep all of the money. It’s an ideal way to start. Usually you’ll need your own payment system to accept the money and your own webspace to sell it – but that’s very cheap to do these days.
Resell Rights can be free, or cost anywhere up to $1000 and beyond. The free Resell Rights are usually not worth bothering with. You want to sell items that have LIMITED distribution – quite simply because you’ll have less competition!

2. Master Resell Rights
Unfortunately these are bad news. With the Master Rights you can pass on Resell Rights yourself. This means one thing – thousands of competitors in a very short time.

3. Reprint Rights
These are sometimes confused with Resell Rights but they are usually used to describe hard-copy material. For example, printed books, tape sets, CD’s or Videos.

You usually have to handle the duplication yourself but sometimes the company will provide copies, and even ship them for you, for a small fee.
These products usually cost more to acquire the rights but can be very profitable. As the old saying goes, it’s easier to sell 10 copies at $1000 each than it is to sell 1000 at $10.

4. Affiliate Programs
When you enter into an affiliate agreement you are sharing the cost and effort of promoting a product. You will take a percentage of the sales in exchange, so you want at least 50% for it to be worth your while.
With an affiliate program you can usually join at no cost, but will make less money – and have more competitors!
One other advantage, the company provides the site and the collection of payments. All you do is promote and cash your check.

5. Drop Shipping
This makes the traditional form of selling easier for the information age. Profit = Cost – Selling Price , and with a Drop Shipper you merely take the money from your customer and tell the shipper to send them the product. You then pay the shipper their price. For example, you can buy a Widescreen TV for $1299 but you are selling it for $1499. You make $200 per sale but never get involved in the distribution at all.
This method is used extensively on eBay and in online shopping malls.

6. Joint Ventures
These blur the line between the other processors. Basically, you connect those who make products with those who sell and promote them. You can acquire resell rights, or create your own product, or be part of an affiliate network. You then contact possible sellers, for example Ezine Owners, who may be interested in selling the product for a cut of the profit.
This way you can connect BIG sellers with BIG products and slice of some of the profit for yourself!

7. Branding Rights
These can be combined with Resell Rights but sometimes are offered as an extra. With Branding Rights you can make some or all of the links within a product possible money-spinners for yourself.

For example, you can take a book on copywriting and give it away, or sell it. But within this book are other links to further services, all that could make extra back-end sales for you.

As you can see there are plenty of ways to make money WITHOUT the expense of time of building your own product!
by Stuart Reid

http://www.netpreneurnow.com

About The Author

Stuart Reid is an ezine publisher and webmaster. Try the new “Any Brander” Software and brand ANY product, old or new, with your own link – even if you didn’t create it!

http://v3k.net/anybrander

The Hollywood portrayal of Mergers and Acquisitions on Wall Street is that the money guys come in and slash the staff, do their financial gymnastics, show impressive short term profits, and then flip the company to a new buyer and pocket millions on the backs of the loyal displaced employees. Does this really happen? Unfortunately is does happen, but the circumstances are generally the result of industries becoming bloated with legacy costs and wages and benefits at a level not competitive with the world economy. We have seen it with the steel industry, airlines, and now the auto industry.

However, for the family business, the backdrop is much different. The organizations are generally very lean. The employees are not constrained in their job description by union rules. They do what is necessary to get the job done. They often can perform multiple jobs and get plugged in where needed. Every employee is vital to the company’s performance.

Business buyers are generally pretty smart folks. If they aren’t, pretty soon they will find themselves in trouble from poor acquisition choices. They recognize the value that the employees bring to the table. These employees are keepers of the customer relationships, they are the well of knowledge about the company’s products and competitive advantage, they know all the gotcha’s to avoid. They are the new buyer’s path to business continuity post acquisition and they are valued.

Business buyers look to mitigate risk by keeping these employees in place and will attempt to access the likelihood of key employees staying on post acquisition. We have heard from business buyers that if they feel like key employee A and key employee B leave, then we are not interested in the acquisition. As business sellers it is important to recognize this and to take necessary steps in advance of your sale to help the key employees stay.

At a point where the sale is ready to close, it is important to make sure employees have some reassurances that the ownership change will improve their situation. Often times the benefit package from the large company buyer is superior to the current package. Buyers will often incorporate a salary increase after the merger or acquisition. Owners may elect to share some of their gains with key loyal employees through a stay on bonus or some lump sum payment recognizing the years of loyal service.

The finance and administrative area is the one exception to this rule. These functions are often a total duplication of those functions in the buying company and these employees are most vulnerable to a cut. These employees have contributed greatly to the company and have been loyal. The seller, unfortunately, can not dictate to the buyer that these employees have to be retained, so he must make accommodations on his own. He should attempt to get an understanding from the buyer, their plans for these employees and arrive at a joint proactive communication plan with the buyer. If the news is bad for the employee, the seller, at the very least should give the employee as much advanced notice as possible. The seller will often implement some severance package, if one was not already in place to give the displaced employee a chance to seek a new opportunity without financial hardship.

Most of the employees will be vital to the post acquisition success of the new company. If they interface with customers and/or suppliers they will be needed. If they are in possession of key knowledge about the company, products, industry, technology, etc., they will be valued and will have a solid job post sale.

About the Author:
Dave Kauppi is a Merger and Acquisition Advisor and President of MidMarket Capital, representing owners in the sale of privately held businesses. We provide Wall Street style investment banking services to lower mid market companies at a size appropriate fee structure.

The story does however raise an interesting point about mergers and acquisitions and that is that they often take place for the right reasons, not just as some people believe, purely to get rid of competition and monopolise a particular market.

Mergers and acquisitions have a colourful past to say the least. By the man in the street they are seen as either the big boys of the business world bullying their way to becoming bigger than everyone else or just, plain and simple, the pursuit of excessive wealth. Sony’s merger with Columbia and Tri-Star Pictures is one such incident that gives the process a bad name. Eventually Sony wrote off $2.7m to sort out all the legal problems.

But for every case where it appears vast sums of money have been wasted or lost there is a case where an acquisition actually works. The partnership between BMW and Rolls Royce was beneficial to both parties and AOL’s acquisition of Time Warner has mean that in the long term Time Warner was able to weather some particularly bad storms without disappearing completely.

So what does it all mean? What is involved?

There are subtle differences in mergers and acquisitions. An acquisition, which is also known as a takeover, takes place when one company is bought by another company. There are two types of acquisition and it is the confusion between the two that often results in the bad press that the process is often given.

A hostile takeover takes place when a company does not want to be taken over. It’s this type of merger that people seem to remember as it’s often the type of story that makes the papers and receives the most coverage in the media. Hostile takeovers occur for various reasons but money and competition are usually at the heart of the decision. A larger company may feel threatened by the potential of a smaller company to take a share of a particular market. In such a case the larger company would be seen as using its power to intimidate and unfairly control the market.

A friendly takeover involves more of a process of negotiations and most of the time is beneficial to both parties. A smaller company might be struggling but have valuable resources and talent that could be utilized elsewhere. In such a case a large company can help out by buying the smaller company. The process is often also started by the smaller company. Very often they have reached a point where they can go no further with the tools at their disposal and need help to expand and move forward. Sometimes the only way to get this help is through the process of being acquired by a bigger entity in the same field of business.

A merger differs slightly to an acquisition in that it is the combination of two or more companies to form a completely new company. With an acquisition the companies involved either keep their names or disappear. In a merger the parties involved emerge under a new banner with a new identity and name. Although mergers have a better reputation than acquisitions there is still room for abuse and they are looked at closely by the authorities to determine what impact they will have on a market.

So on the face of it the CH4 and FIVE merger would appear to be an interesting proposition; one helping out the other in light of difficult times for TV companies. However I’m sure it’ll be closely looked at before any decision is made. Only time will tell.

We were recently engaged to sell a medical products company. In our process we will identify 50 to 150 companies that would be likely buyers based on similar products, services or markets served. When those targets are approved by our seller client, we get on the phone and contact the buying prospect to see if we can generate some interest and get confidentiality agreements executed.

We were able to identify several interested buyers and were at the stage where they were submitting their qualified Letters of Intent. The LOI basically says that if we complete our due diligence and we find that everything is as you earlier presented it, we will pay you $XXX under these terms and conditions.

We got one offer from a perfect fit buyer and we determined that it was well short of our seller’s expectations and well below what our view of the price for similar companies in this market niche. We called this buyer to discuss his offer.

When we told him our client’s range of expectations, he said that it was way too expensive. We asked him what basis he had for that conclusion, he replied that he was looking to pay 5 X Cash Flow for a business. We told him that recent transactions indicated that similar companies were selling for 2.5 times revenues and not a price based on a cash flow model.

Let’s take this a little further with some ball park calculations based on our transaction. For example, if our client had $5 million in revenue and a 20% cash flow margin, his cash flow is $1 million and according to this buyer, his company should sell for 5 X $1 million or $5 million. The market view, however, is that this company is worth $5 million X 2.5 or $12.5 million. When we dug a little deeper into our buyer’s offer we found out that he currently was in the process of buying another similar company.

When we inquired for more detail we found that this other company was a long time competitor, the owner was getting ready to retire and approached this buyer to see if he would be interested in acquiring them. We asked the buyer if the seller was represented by an investment banker, business broker or merger and acquisition advisor. He said that the seller was not. I asked him if there were any other buyers involved in the process. He said that as far as he knew, he was the only buyer. I asked him how the selling price was determined. The buyer said that he set the price based on, you guessed it, 5 X cash flow.

Let’s see what this seller’s approach is going to cost him. If we assume that he was very similar in size and cash flow to our client. A competitive market price in a formal merger and acquisition process would be $12.5 million. Our buyer will pay him only $5 million and the seller will close thinking he got a fair deal without any market validation. This is a $7.5 million mistake that could have very easily been avoided by hiring a business sales professional that would have invited in multiple buyers and multiple competitive bids.

Well, at least the seller avoided all investment banker fees. This is a sad end to a 25 year history of business excellence. Unfortunately it happens all the time.