Sell-Side M&A Advisors: How to Choose One, How Much They Cost, and The Importance of the "Fine Print"

Today’s episode is for anybody who ever plans to sell a company.

Most entrepreneurs will sell a business once in their entire careers (if they’re lucky), and as a result many understandably don’t have a lot of context or experience in the finer points of exiting, specifically when it comes to how to select an M&A advisor. Most advice that I’ve come across in this domain is frankly too high level to be useful, so today I wanted to get really detailed on how to select an M&A advisor, how much you should expect to pay them, what’s included & excluded from the fees that they charge, and other critical contractual terms you should be aware of before hiring one of them.

To help us answer some of these questions, I’m joined today by John Carvalho. John is the President of Stone Oak Capital, an M&A advisory firm that focuses exclusively on middle market businesses, with a specific focus on transactions between $10 and $100 million.

John is also the Founder of Divestopedia. Since its inception in 2012, Divestopedia has become THE place to go for anybody contemplating selling their company: It contains a dictionary of more than 500 M&A related terms, thousands of articles on the exit process, and is now one of the world's leading online resources for selling a mid-sized business.

In addition to his experience advising CEOs, John is also an entrepreneur himself, having co-founded Wolverine Energy Services Inc. in 2012 with an initial acquisition of a $5 million revenue oilfield services company. From the first acquisition to 2020, John and his business partner acquired 16 more businesses, grew revenue to $240 million and took the company public.