Smart Business Dealmakers: The Middle-Market M&A Podcast

The venture capital market is active and deals are getting done. So what can investors and early-to-mid-stage companies expect for investment opportunities in this new normal? Capital Midwest General Partner Daniel Einhorn discusses what he's seen during COVID and his expectations for 2021.

Entrepreneurs and business executives are seeing deal flow increase as the M&A market settles into a new reality. But with that comes new legal challenges for businesses involved in dealmaking. Paul Klug, a shareholder with law firm Polsinelli, explains what he's seeing from clients and why 2021 could be a strong year for M&A.

If there's one common mistake business owners make when planning their future, it is failing to prepare for the sale of their company — typically the largest financial asset in their portfolio. John Kvamme, senior vice president of wealth management at Associated Bank, says you can't start early enough. He shares successful steps entrepreneurs can take to get started and strategies to enhance and maximize value in a business before the sale.

The venture capital ecosystem continues to grow as more money is funneled into early-stage company investments. What does that mean for the scale-up community that's looking for growth capital? David Brophy, professor of finance and director of the Office for the Study of Private Equity Finance at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, discusses the evolution of venture capital, his current project studying the flow of money, and the upcoming 41st annual Midwest Growth Capital Symposium.

Getting a deal done means digging deep into the details of a company's financials, including taxes. For companies with exposure across multiple tax districts and asset classes, that can be a challenge. Tom Bakaitus, Partner-in-Charge of the Western Pennsylvania operations of Herbein + Company, explores how buyers and sellers can minimize their financial risks, what factors are driving deals, and best practices that can be implemented to add efficiency to the deal-closing process.

Greg Cathcart, CEO & Founder of Excellis Heath, sold his business in late 2020 to the Denmark-based NNIT Group. But the groundwork for a deal began when the company was founded in 2008. Greg talks about the NNIT deal and the steps the company took from the start to be ready for a transaction.

Sara Clevenger, a principal at the middle-market M&A advisory firm Blue River, talks about 2020 — how her clients reacted and adjusted, the impact on deal flow, how the tumultuous year ended — but also about the outlook for 2021 and what pandemic-related deal adjustments we might expect to see carry from the last year to now.

Dan Roselli, founder of CFV Ventures and co-founder of RevTechLabs Healthtech, Queen City Insurtech, Queen City FinTech and RevTech Labs, discusses whether early-stage investment fundamentals have been altered by COVID, the eagerness (or timidity) of capital, and the sectors with early-stage businesses that are attracting the most investor interest.

As CEO of Paladin Capital, Bill Prevost wants to do business acquisition and ownership transfer via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan model. But the distress that hit smaller companies in the trucking industry — fallout from the pandemic — shrunk his deal pipeline because he's looking for companies of a certain fitness. In this conversation, Prevost talks about how that affected his firm, ESOPs and their popularity, and his outlook for 2021.

Crowdfunding was once seen as a way for entrepreneurs to raise cash and bootstrap their ideas. But Louis Foreman, CEO of Enventys Partners, sees it as a way to get market validation. We talked with Foreman about product innovation, raising capital, recent patent activity trends and the commonalties among his 15 clients who appeared on the TV show Shark Tank.