Next Steps

Let’s Talk

Planning an exit is an event relatively few people earn the privilege to perform. Understanding the personal and corporate objectives of the entrepreneur and investors is the best place to start. The next step for us is to listen to you.

Let’s start with having a conversation. We will be glad to come to a location of your choosing or you are always welcome to meet in our office. We can also meet “virtually.”

How We Help Plan And Execute Your Transition

We provide three core services to assist entrepreneurs and investors who are planning an exit.

Investment Thesis: Find out what your company is worth today

ExitHigh’s Investment Thesis answers the question: What is your company worth today? We begin by analyzing your company’s competitive environment, probing its strengths and opportunities, understanding current weaknesses and potential threats, and evaluating industry forces and growth trends.

With this foundation, we build a detailed 5 year Pro Forma model based on your addressable market. The Pro Forma model forecasts future cash flows under different scenarios and assumptions. Based on these future cash flows, we derive the intrinsic value of your company. Since this intrinsic value is based on the fundamentals of your company – and is documented and defensible – it provides a good estimate of what your company is worth today. This Pro Forma model also enables you to test different strategies to see which create value and which strategies may destroy value. The Investment Thesis provides the transaction team with an objective estimate of the company’s market value. Knowing this value provides a crucial metric when evaluating offers to buy or invest in the company.

Investment Case: Prove why someone should buy your company

ExitHigh’s Investment Case builds upon the Investment Thesis by digging deeper into your company’s virtues and capabilities and highlights how you build value and drive performance. The resulting deliverable is a “book” that that gets everybody “on the same page” (owners, management team, employees, and investors) and tells your company’s story in a convincing, compelling, and authentic manner to make the investment case for acquiring or investing in your company.

We begin by analyzing the company’s historical performance to get a solid understanding of “the points that have already been put on the scoreboard.” We scrutinize financial statements, but from the perspective of an investment banker, to identify points to brag about as well as surfacing issues requiring attention and mitigation. We profile how the company makes and spends money, its pattern of investing in the future and its selling methods. We examine how the company’s performance compares to other companies in the industry and calculate key drivers of profitability and value.

We then turn our attention to performing a comprehensive competitive analysis by researching industry trends, customer segments, and primary competitors. We highlight the company’s strategic position, its key differentiators, and assess the impact five competitive forces have on the company.

Next, we document the company’s business model and value chain and profile the addressable market. We also analyze the company’s products and services, pricing model, customer concentration, and revenue mix.

This sets the stage for profiling the company’s growth strategy, its approach to segment expansion to drive organic growth, and evaluating the potential for acquisitions. This analysis culminates by incorporating a detailed 5 year Pro Forma model.

ExitHigh Plan: The path to securing the value you have created

The ExitHigh Plan prepares the business owner and the company for both the transition and the transaction. We start by taking a holistic approach to understanding the objectives, needs, and aspirations of the following stakeholders:

the company
the entrepreneur
the entrepreneur’s family
co-owners
investors
the management team and key employees

Working with the business owner, we develop a written Exit Plan and assemble the multidisciplinary team of advisors possessing the skill sets and experience to prepare the entrepreneur and the company for the exit transaction. Our comprehensive framework includes:

Analyzing the financial planning needs of the entrepreneur
Assessing the various exit options, types, strategies, and structures
Recruiting and organizing the “Transaction Team”
Building the Investment Case
Preparing the company for financial and legal due diligence
Conducting the exit transaction
Providing post-exit planning and support

ExitHigh’s Virtual Team Office is a confidential and secure website that is used by the multidisciplinary team of advisors to facilitate collaboration and planning so that the needs and best interests of the entrepreneur are always kept front and center throughout the exit planning and execution process.

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