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In this episode, Drew talks about the three highlights of how deals go down in the private equity process. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Three highlights on how deals go down in the private equity Links / Resources FE International Quiet Light Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Hey, everybody. welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Drew Sanocki. I'm still here in San Diego, still stuck. East coast is being slammed by another nor'easter. My wife's watching the kids. It's always good when you negotiate with your wife like, "Hey, I need you to watch the kids because I got this business thing I gotta deal with on the west coast. It's only gonna be 48 hours. I'll be back in a couple days." You negotiate that, she signs off, and then you're there for the whole week, and every time they FaceTime you, they see palm trees in the background, and you FaceTime them, it's like dark because it's snowing. They're losing power and stuff. So shout out to my wife, Sarah. I love you. Thank you for watching the kids. But it allows me to talk a little bit more about buying and selling a company, private equity. In this podcast, I'd like to delve into kind of how it goes down. I was working on the AutoAnything deal for maybe two months. It was accelerated because AutoZone wanted to close the deal by the end of their fiscal quarter. Typically, these process ... I've been a part of deals that have gone for like six months, and those are only the bigger ones. On the other end of the spectrum, when I sold Design Public, my small first retailer, that probably took about a month. It has to do with a lot of things: how sophisticated your buyer is or your investor, how buttoned up your own business is. But today I kind of want to talk about how the deals go down and really highlight three things. Number one is the process. This is the process you will go through if you go to sell your business or raise money or, if you are on the other side of the table and you wanna buy a business. That's the process. Number two: quick sidebar on valuations, just where you get them. Do they come out of thin air or not? And I just wanna touch on the third thing: control. That obviously applies if you are not exiting a business, but if you take an investment, control becomes a big thing. How much control do you give up of your company? Again, this all applies whether you are doing the buying or the selling, but let's start with the process. The process for ... I've probably been a part of 20 different deals, some as the buyer, some as the seller. It kind of all follows the same four or five steps. The first step is that, if you are selling, you hire a banker to run your process or a broker or decide to do it yourself, but the general idea of the process is that the banker or you, whoever's running the process, creates a deal book. The deal book is, I don't know, 10 to 20 pages, nice and pretty, with a lot of charts and graphs showing just what a wonderful investment your company is. You spend some time working with the professional to kind of put that deal book together, and then you or whoever you've hired approaches potential buyers with that deal book. The idea is to drum up interest. Typically, the banker will add some urgency into the process like, "Hey, here's the deal book on Auto Anything, and if you are interested, we'd like some approximate bid or something by next Thursday." There might be a couple calls with potential investors then or potential funds, but the first step is assembling that deal book and getting it in front of the right people. That's, I'd say, the more proactive way to sell your business. There's always the reactive way,