Me The Dealmaker Some years ago I was in the banking business. That is where I got my start out of college. I figured banking was where you wanted to be in finance. You learned the ropes and basics of business and balance sheets. You got to visit companies and see how they worked. I worked on big loan packages and small ones. I even worked on multinational deals for fortune 500 companies. Multinationals were the pits. If you wanted to be stuck in a bureaucratic dead end that is what you did. So I gravitated to much smaller businesses where the average guy, me, could get a foothold in the action. So I got into small business lending. The only problem was I was still banking, working for someone else. I am an entrepreneur at heart. But the one thing banking gave me was an appreciation of the wide open opportunities that the millions of small businesses in the US offered. They offer opportunities in consulting, in marketing, in finance, and most importantly, in becoming CEO of a company. If you want to be a CEO of a company you just get yourself hired by a small company. If they won’t hire you, go onto the next one. And if none of them hire you, just buy one! Then you are CEO instantly. As it turns out the banking turmoil and mergers of the eighties helped me make my decision to exit banking. And this was tough because I came from a family of bankers. I wasn’t, however, sure I wanted to be a CEO. After all, that was work to me. I wanted to be a dealmaker. No, not like Trump, he was too flashy. I wanted to work on acquisitions of small companies. I wanted to OWN a company so that the CEO could work for me! So I set out to do it. Now, one may say it was easy for me to do, I was a banker. However, in the final analysis banking didn’t teach anything about acquiring, owning or running companies. What actually did teach me about owning companies was owning one. So with a little help from one a guy who did it before, I put together the smallest of small LBO deals to own. And there I was, the real dealmaker, putting together my own deal instead of someone else’s. It was under $1mm in sales, made the owner about $150,000 in net and did injection molding. It is and was a daunting idea. Every time I buy a company it’s like I just one the lottery. It’s also scary because it is a brand new entity with new people and it is big and intimidating. But the beauty of dealmaking is that it never ends, the sky is the limit and every new deal is the first of great things to come.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:48:49 +0000
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