Selling Your Agency Business

In this, our fourth episode, I'm joined by David Blois, the Founder and Managing Partner at M&A Advisory, the specialists advising on company sales, mergers and acquisitions in the marketing communications, media and martech sectors.
 
In this broad ranging conversation, David and I cover all that you need to know about selling your agency business.
 
Some of my favourite parts were:
 
✅ The best time to engage an M&A Advisory firm;
✅ The steps in the sale process from Offer through to Completion;
✅ The importance and value of structuring the incentive part of the deal correctly;
✅ The structure of deals and earn out periods David is seeing at the moment;
✅ The importance of getting your books in shape to help you run your business and expedite the sale process.
 
 

Transcript

Adam (00:04.924)
So today I'm here with David Blois, the founder and managing partner of M&A Advisory. David, welcome to the Fractional CFO Show, how are you doing?

David Blois (00:14.814)
I'm doing well thanks Adam, thanks very much for inviting me.

Adam (00:18.748)
Thanks for being here. I guess to start with, would you mind giving us a little bit of an overview of your career so far, so you can understand where you're coming from?

David Blois (00:29.454)
Sure, yeah, I started off always very, very interested in business, even as a child. And it was my father's fault, but he said in those days, he said, you won't get on in business son, unless you're an accountant. So I trained as an accountant. I don't know whether, I don't think, he was an engineer, so I don't know whether those words were right. But anyway, so I ended up...

joining the REED International as it was then, a counsecy training scheme and trained for my certified accountants exams and moved around with REED. I stayed with REED Elsevier as it became for about 17 years. I was very fortunate. I travelled all around the world with them in North America and Africa and Europe.

and finished up in corporate finance when they went through a huge restructuring and that gave me some acquisition experience.

After leaving Read, it was quite interesting. At the time they had this concept called shareholder value, which I didn't really believe in at all. It was really basically the maximum of it was do everything only in the interest of shareholders, not other stakeholders. I needed to find an industry that valued people. So I ended up writing to Sarchin Sarchi, worked

David Blois (02:03.644)
in Hungary, in their subsidiary in Hungary. So I went off to Budapest as the finance director, later commercial director and that was literally my baptism of fire and advertising where I learnt an awful lot. From there I moved on to the

Adam (02:08.613)
Well...

David Blois (02:23.342)
to doing consulting of my own. I felt that I wanted to leave the corporate world, do consulting of my own. And then I joined a business called Meta, the founder of a company called Results International, which were an M&A consultancy specialising in the marketing space. I knew some of my international experience working on overseas deals with them and I stayed with them about 15 years.

Then they gradually moved more into healthcare and technology and at that point I started my own business, M&A advisory and we've been going about 12 or 13 years and where we've got offices in St Catherine's Dock and we are focused on the Marcom's and MarTech sectors.

Adam (03:07.904)
Excellent, excellent and a very varied career and I can relate to your father telling you to be an accountant because I had a very similar situation myself so it hasn't done me too badly nor you so that's interesting to hear.

David Blois (03:17.635)
Ha ha.

David Blois (03:21.77)
No, I guess it was pretty good advice, maybe. Ha ha ha.

Adam (03:26.957)
Could you tell me, because maybe some of our audience won't understand or won't have come across an M&A advisory firm, can you tell me a little bit about what you do as a firm, who hires you, how does it work for them as potential sellers, what your business model is?

David Blois (03:45.418)
Yes certainly. So we will work for, most of our work as an M&A advisory firm is for sellers because sellers usually only sell their business once. Buyers are buying businesses all the time. So generally if we work for a buyer it's generally targeting a particular type of business that they need almost like a headhunter really and giving them a little bit of advice along the way. But for our firm we often...

Adam (04:09.181)
Mm-hmm.

David Blois (04:15.242)
maybe work for buyers that have never worked, done a deal before. But if we work for sellers, which is about 90% of our business, those people are usually only selling for the first time and it's important to make sure they get a good deal. We make sure that we avoid, make sure they avoid all the potential pitfalls that there are in doing an M&A transaction, selling their business.

making sure that they get a fair deal and get what they're looking for really. So it's important to give them a choice of buyers. So what we do is we prepare information for them, review their business to see what information they have. Sometimes we go in a couple of years before they sell to make sure that their business is ready for sale.

And at the time of sale, we...

prepare some of their information that would be interesting to buyers, make sure the accounts are adjusted to include any add-backs, what you might call normalised, you know if they had an exceptional cost that might be able to be added back for example. And we would do an awful lot of research on a buyer universe for them to make sure they have the best choice of possible buyer. And that would include people we know as buyers because as an M&A firm.

We're out talking with buyers all of the time, but also it would be buyers who think, as well as know who might be interested, who we think might be interested in acquiring the business. So we do a lot of research and then we prepare an anonymous one-pager on the business and send that out to buyers at a CEO level.

Adam (05:54.909)
Mm-hmm.

David Blois (06:08.346)
and if they're interested that we get an NDA in place, non-disclosure agreement, they will meet the buyer and see some of the information and if the meeting goes well in terms of chemistry etc. and we see that there could be a potential future opportunity there, then we'll have further meetings and finally we get to a stage of calling in offers.

and you get to a thing, you agree and negotiate the deal with them and you get to a thing called a heads of terms and after the heads of terms is signed, which is effectively the deal between the two parties, the buying party pays for lawyers to create a contract, the sellers, lawyers check the contract.

and the buyer will also pay for due diligence accountants to review the books. And all of this process takes about two months and at the end of it you get completion and then the deal is done. And we project manage that all the way through. So it's sort of research, recommendations.

Adam (07:17.015)
Mm-hmm.

David Blois (07:20.674)
and facilitation of negotiations and managing the deal at the end of the process. That's probably our function.

Adam (07:30.484)
Great. That's very comprehensive and lots there that I want to get into actually. So some interesting areas that you've covered. I guess maybe just to take a step back and understand for the audience where we are at the moment, because you know, I understand that 2022 from an M&A point of view was quite sort of lots of activity happening. I think the beginning of 2023 there was as well in the marketing communication space, but obviously there's quite a lot of

David Blois (07:34.67)
Ciao.

Adam (08:00.256)
uncertainty in the world this year. So how are you seeing the environment for Marcom's M&A right now?

David Blois (08:08.17)
Yeah, it's quite an interesting market. It's quite challenging for sure. Deals are taking a little bit longer to get across the line. Due diligence and legals can take longer. Usually they are, it's almost automatic pilot, due diligence and legals after the head's assigned, but it's taking longer. There's, nevertheless, there's a demand for good quality businesses.

Adam (08:29.832)
Mm-hmm.

David Blois (08:37.57)
There are people who invested in other businesses, perhaps internationally, US buyers that want to acquire in Europe who are coming to the UK. So if you've got a good quality business, there's certainly still demand there for them, for sure. But it's definitely a tougher market, more challenging market, but not an impossible market.

Adam (08:37.597)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (08:57.229)
Okay.

Adam (09:04.152)
Okay, great. And I guess following on from that, most of the people who will listen to this are in the smaller end of the market, so maybe up to sort of 20 million turnover size. To frame the conversation about the types of M&A that you would see in this kind of space for those size of businesses, who would be a typical buyer for a small marketing

David Blois (09:16.642)
Hmm

David Blois (09:31.318)
There could be quite a number. I mean you could have, on the upper end, you could have private equity looking to acquire in its own right to create sort of a platform acquisition for that sort of company. So there's plenty of private equity money around still. There often trade buyers, there's a number of trade buyers out there. The US,

Adam (09:44.093)
Mm-hmm.

David Blois (09:58.674)
European trade buyers, I mean a deal was announced last week with a company called Team Ferner, bought quite a big European PR buyer. So that deal's happening all the time, as I say, and let's say US private equity and UK private equity, these companies are ambitious to grow and are still doing deals right now.

Adam (10:12.468)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (10:25.48)
Great, that's good to hear. That's good to hear. And you mentioned before about the sort of bringing a company such as yourselves in two years before selling. I'd be interested to understand, you know, if there's any kind of milestones or size that one would need to get to, to work back from, to understand at what point, because maybe two years before sale.

they might not be quite right or they might not know that they want to sell at exactly that point. So is there any guidance you give to potential people selling their businesses about when the right time is to bring you in?

David Blois (11:03.158)
Yeah, sure. Some people come to me and they ask me that straight question, when should I sell? And I've got a very simple answer. I say to them, when do you want to sell? We're fortunate enough to work in a people industry and these founders, it's very much what they want to do. So as a founder, it might be a personal choice, like you want to retire or you want to work on a different...

Adam (11:14.932)
Hehehe

David Blois (11:32.338)
on a different stage for example, and your considerations for the business. You're looking for a US office or something like that and they're all reasons to sell your business. So it's very much a founder led decision. Now what we do, probably a couple of years before sale...

is we'll do a review of the business and we'll look at all aspects of the business and we'll look at what's, in terms of the market, what's good about the business, what's very strong, we call those premium factors, and what's perhaps a little bit weaker about the business that might put a buyer off if you came to look at it and you might describe that as a discount factor. And the idea being is that you would...

maximise those premium factors but you'd also attempt to raise some of the discount factors. The nice thing about the marketing industry is that you can turn these businesses around fairly quickly. It doesn't have a long lead time, it's not that big super tanker effect. It's going to be probably a year, two years and you can have the thing absolutely on fine tune.

the idea of that is and what we'll also do is look at things like margins, look at projections and we'll come up with a sort of a forecast of probably an optimum time to sell the business including fixing some of the things that we suggest needs fixing. So at the end of the day, the end of this process we like to think there'll be left with a better business.

which will be more profitable for them even if they decide not to sell. So it's quite a worthwhile exercise.

Adam (13:22.801)
Yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. And in terms of, and I guess, I kind of know the answer to this one before I ask it, but I wonder if there's any, are there any tips around what those premium factors are or what those discount factors are that we could tell the audience now so that they have an awareness of them, maybe not in the detail that you would go into.

David Blois (13:43.854)
Yes. No, certainly, it's obviously always best to have it on a sort of a personalised, individual basis, one of these things. But the sort of in general terms that things that to look out for, I mean, obviously as a business it's good to have a pretty focused proposition. To have some good financial systems and procedures, that's really important. To have a second tier management team of some sort. It can't be...

the business can't be very reliant on the founder. If you've got a big client concentration, 20 to 30 percent, or with one client, that's something that you may want to work on. Or sometimes if you work for a certain type of client, some people come to me with a business, sometimes in the early days of a marketing business, they serve the marketing industry. So all of their...

clients tend to be agency clients or a large proportion and sometimes that can make a business sometimes a little bit more difficult to sell when it's a smaller business. So I sort of try and encourage people to go out and have the relationship with the clients and start to win clients. So different things like that are the sort of things we look at and are quite important.

Adam (15:00.623)
Hmm.

Adam (15:06.352)
That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely.

David Blois (15:07.53)
And of course there's key ratios as well in the industry that's important to try and get to.

Adam (15:15.428)
Understood. And in terms of valuations, because I know that, you know, questions I often get as a as a finance director is, you know, what's my business worth? And I appreciate it can be subjective. But as you say, there are some industry standards or some ratios that you would use. So what at the moment would a typical valuation multiple be for a sort of 20 million pound turnover business? How are you kind of seeing that right now?

David Blois (15:41.954)
Yeah, I mean valuations or actual multiples, I've been doing this quite a long time, and multiples haven't really changed much in the industry. So generally for a Markhomes business, what the deal is predicated on is between a four times multiple and an eight times multiple. So at the bottom end, you've probably got a smaller business very sort of with perhaps founder-led, very reliant on the founder, maybe one or two clients.

Adam (15:49.511)
Okay.

Adam (16:00.957)
Okay.

David Blois (16:11.434)
it's sort of not the finished article and it's probably making only you know only perhaps up to half a million or something like that three or four hundred thousand and at the other end you've got a business making you know two, three million that's got perhaps technology IP or some strong IP that's really drawing in the clients so you've got an automatic growth it's a high growth business making quite a lot of money good second-tier management

Adam (16:18.676)
Mm-hmm.

David Blois (16:40.502)
team, good systems and procedures and that will command a much higher multiple. So you predicate the deal on that but clearly some of the deal is based on you get about 50% of the current value up front and then there's usually an incentive payment of some sort, be it shares, be it an earn out or whatever and you can earn quite a lot of additional

consideration through that process. And generally there's what's called a deal maximum with these deals which you might be able to earn under an earn out. And that might give a sum. And the danger is sometimes in the press they compare the deal maximum to last year's statutory accounts profit. And they say, wow, that company went for a 50 times multiple. That's not the case.

You know, the deal is predicated between roughly four and eight times in nearly every case.

Adam (17:47.948)
Understood and actually that was my next question in terms of the structure. So you talk about the 50% upfront and then the balance. Is that balance typically over a period of time? What's the sort of average earn out period that you're seeing at the moment?

David Blois (17:56.758)
Yeah.

David Blois (18:03.934)
Yeah, generally, if it's an earn out, it's roughly two or three years. I mean, there's some businesses out there that offer larger earn outs, but I would generally, depending on the situation, I wouldn't normally recommend those to my clients. I would try and get the thing done in two to three years, because otherwise I think it becomes a burnout rather than an earn out.

Adam (18:28.864)
I see what you did there, yeah. Okay. And I guess in terms of, you mentioned before about the universe of buyers, I think, or the buyer universe you mentioned, that you'll come up with based on people you know and research that you've done. So I'd like to just move on to that and understand a little bit about that because obviously you hear about in the

David Blois (18:41.101)
Yes.

Adam (18:56.9)
falter on the culture or falter on different values between the buyer and the seller. So what is, you know, as the seller, what can I do upfront ahead of time with your help to make sure I've got the access to the best possible universe?

David Blois (19:02.306)
Mm.

David Blois (19:14.378)
Yes, well I think there's a number of things really. I mean I think what you've got to do is use, I mean it's a bit self-serving, but really you should use an advisor. I do find that a lot of where deals go wrong, a lot of people get what's very flattered by what's called an approach where you get a buyer knocking on their door and saying, do you want to sell your business? And they're quite, as I say, they're quite flattered by that.

But you very often don't get the optimum buyer like that. They don't.

Adam (19:47.472)
And just on that, sorry, because I had a situation myself where I had that happen. What would you recommend? Because I guess in some instances, that might be the right buyer just coming through a different channel, but obviously it's great with a service like yours where you can double check. So would you recommend in that situation for someone to come to you and go, we've been approached by XYZ, what do you think kind of thing?

David Blois (20:00.47)
Yeah.

David Blois (20:13.066)
Yeah, I think if they were seriously thinking about selling, then that might be an idea. It can be an awful waste of time entertaining buyers like the knock on your door because you, A, and I'll go on to it in perhaps a bit more detail, you don't know that it's the right buyer and I can talk a little bit more about that, but also you haven't got a competitive pricing. You're not comparing, you're not getting bids from...

three or four buyers, you're only getting bids from one. So from a negotiating perspective you're in a very weak position and you don't often get the offer from people, get a financial offer until they've asked a lot of questions about your business and have sort of met you several times which can be extremely time consuming and throw you off your current business. It's important not to be distracted from that.

that can be dangerous. I often say to people, you know, would you sell, you know, your business is by far the most valuable asset you have and would you sell your house like that? Would you just wait for a knock on the door to sell your house? Even though you weren't thinking about moving, you get a knock on the door and say, would you sell your house? You might be quite happy there, you know, and that's the thing.

I think for a seller of a business you've got to have a reason to sell and you've got to be ready for it, either retirement or you know what you want in terms of playing on a bigger stage. I think sellers should have probably more confidence in that there will always be buyers for their business. Don't worry about the fact that if this buyer who's just knocked on the door doesn't buy it, you'll never find another one.

because there are plenty of buyers out there for sure.

Adam (22:12.693)
Okay great and you mentioned about the right type of buyer and I think you said earlier in the process about a chemistry meeting. I guess that's what you would do right, is you'd have those meetings with A&Other and you know the ones that you propose. Maybe could you just talk us through the best type of way to handle those chemistry meetings and how to sort of identify which of those is the right potential partner, all else being equal?

David Blois (22:19.64)
yet.

David Blois (22:39.77)
Absolutely. Clearly you want to try and get a choice of potential buyers and what we say to our clients is there should be three elements in every deal. So there should be chemistry between the parties so when you meet the buyer for the first time you should think, ah, I like them or if you get a feeling in your gut that you don't like them.

it's probably a bad sign because very often first impressions of these things are quite telling, you know, so I would definitely say to people chemistry is very important, that initial chemistry when you meet the buyer for the first time. Second important element is that you've got to have a cultural match between the businesses and that's a business culture. So you could describe that as a style of working.

For example, you wouldn't put a professional, sorry, a bureaucratic type business with an entrepreneurial business because you know post-deal they're not going to work together well, they're just going to jar. So you'd always look for a cultural fit. So that's another box that needs to be ticked. And the third thing is what you might call an outstanding business proposition. So that when you talk with the party...

the different companies, there should be one that sticks out to say, actually, if we work with this company, there's going to be so many opportunities. There's going to be a chance of US office or European clients or all of these things that are coming into those businesses. And again, using the old housing analogy again, it's a bit like buying a house. You go and see three or four houses and there's usually one that sticks out as your

preferred house and that's a bit similar to selling your business. There's usually a buyer that you say, actually I really like them, they do things the way we do things and if we got together there'll be a fantastic business opportunity. So that's what you want and those things will also get you through any incentive payments. I think there has been sort of, I suppose, kind of rumours in the marketplace where people say, oh you only get the first payment but don't expect to get your...

David Blois (25:03.438)
earn out, you know, and if you have those things in place you will get your earn out and with the earn out you can make quite a bit more money, a considerable amount of money. So it's important to have those things in place.

Adam (25:19.296)
Okay great and I'm going to come on to the earn out in a sec because I'm interested to understand more about that but before you get to the earn out I'd like to understand once you've got the offer you know that kind of process of getting from offer to completion what are the sort of typical steps within that a seller needs to sort of be part of and what's the most time consuming or area that they should be most prepared for?

David Blois (25:49.934)
Yes, I think clearly they're really two elements. So once you get to a heads of terms, and basically what I should say is you should aim to get more than one offer ideally, so that they become competitive from two or more buyers. But, and you'll find, as I've mentioned previously, you'll get a preferred buyer. And...

that's the person you might want to do a deal with. So that offer is often negotiated, that's where we can help our expertise and our experience can help to make sure that offer is optimised and that anything sort of negative about it can be removed. Any sort of perhaps sometimes unintentional traps of things that might not work, we try and make sure are removed from the deal. And you come up with heads of agreement.

And so post heads of agreement there are really two things that need to happen. The buyer's lawyer will produce a contract and the seller's lawyer will check it. And that includes all sorts of legal detail. And the other part, and I'm not sure there's a great deal of preparation you can do for that.

again having your sort of records in good shape for legal due diligence is quite important. The second thing is financial due diligence where the buyer will appoint an accounting firm or other financial expert to come in and review your books and that's where having a good set of books, a good finance team ahead of the deal is really useful.

producing accurate accounts regularly, monthly management accounts and all of those sorts of things and having that and having your records easy to hand is worth doing before sale for sure.

Adam (27:56.816)
And is there in terms of that kind of process around the financial due diligence, obviously, you can prepare management accounts for the month or two months before you get to sale, or you can do it for the two years, or what's the sort of, because again, if someone brings yourselves in and they haven't really got a finance team in place, they're a smaller company, they might not have those in place.

How far back does the buyer potentially look and how much detail does one need to go into to get ready for that?

David Blois (28:30.414)
Yes, I mean the buyer may not, in due diligence, he may not go back that far, but I would strongly recommend having good accounts because it will help you as a business and it will help you as a business develop, you know, because you can have a look at key ratios, you can see how you're doing on a regular basis. And so that will help you all the way through to sale and it will help you build a successful business. And in terms of the process itself.

So even if you're a fairly small business, I would recommend you get a grip of your numbers and there are plenty of sort of part-time, two days a week finance directors around that would be available to help you. So that would be, that's something I'd recommend. And also, when you come to the sale process itself, there is nothing worse than the buyer saying...

oh could I see your latest accounts or could I see the latest forecast by the way and then a sudden period of about six months goes by because they you know the seller hasn't been able to produce them so it's it's a really important thing to have buttoned down.

Adam (29:42.724)
I'm glad you said that. I've been involved in some processes where I've been brought in at the 11th hour and it's always easier and better to do it earlier. So slightly leading question there, but yeah, agreed. And I guess final question from my side, just around, I said we come back on the earn outs, just to understand that a little bit in terms of from a seller's perspective.

David Blois (29:50.862)
Yeah, no sure I suspected it was.

Adam (30:07.936)
Yeah, what would they, you say 50% upfront and then some kind of structured earn out, what would the expectation be in terms of involvement around that from a seller? You're selling your business, how involved are you expected to be to be able to hit the targets that are in place and to secure the best possible premium post sale?

David Blois (30:31.086)
Yes, you would generally be fairly involved in that. As a seller, you would normally expect not to leave the business but to continue in the business for a few years. Generally an exit is a kind of exit strategy rather than a pure exit. There are certainly situations where the seller can leave immediately, particularly if he's managed to...

get himself right out of the business. He's got a very strong second tier team and he's working a couple of days a week just meeting clients or whatever. But you can often get yourself out. So if you've got, you manage to create that sort of business that helps with the sale quite a lot. But generally you would expect to be involved in the business for a couple of years and that, and earn outs are often...

you know there's different methods of having incentive payments. Sometimes buyers offer shares, you know you have a roll up so you might get 50% in cash and then a percentage of shares in the new company or keep maybe sell 60% of your own business and keep 40% that's then sold at a later date. And all of these things can be very very lucrative. I had a deal.

a year or so ago that finished where the sellers got probably two or three times more for the 40% than they, the second 40% than they did for the original, 60%. So yeah, it can be, the earn out and the incentive payments can be very attractive and it's, and it's, so people, and the founder would normally stay with it for that period for sure.

Adam (32:25.852)
Very good, very good. And just one more question actually, you mentioned second tier management and I know I was working with a business a few months back where the seller was really not keen on involving the wider business at any point through the process because she was worried about, you know, morale or people leaving or impacting the potential sale. What's your advice to...

David Blois (32:50.158)
Yes.

Adam (32:51.964)
to business owners about when to bring their second tier management in, particularly if they're a real asset that adds value.

David Blois (32:59.886)
Yeah, it's a tricky one, but generally you may well bring in those people that are very close to you, that are the top team, because it may be those people are shareholders in the business anyway. So if you've got three or four shareholders that are the board, then obviously that will become a board decision and you will involve those people. But I really

David Blois (33:29.742)
generally because what you want those guys to do is to carry on working hard, building the business and you don't want to create a rumour mill in the company as to when you're going to sell and who you're going to sell to because it can be very unsettling for people and you might end up losing people because they fear the worst. Generally in all of these deals the staff do very well because they will play on a bigger stage.

it will provide great opportunities for them but that's not the case when you know when they're when they're actually when the sale process is going along it's probably better to just let them get on with with the work and not and not not to involve them in that sales process

Adam (34:15.512)
Yeah, it makes sense and I guess as you say it can take a few months or longer if one of them falls through so getting people involved too early really helps take their eye off the ball.

David Blois (34:26.35)
Absolutely, yeah, no that's right.

Adam (34:29.86)
Okay, brilliant. Well, thank you very much, David. I'm moving on to sort of like the final section, which I'm calling our business book bonus section, where we're asking our guests to provide us with a recommendation for the audience of a business book or some other business content that's really helped you during your business career and that you would want to recommend. So could you tell me a book or other piece of business content that you'd like to recommend?

David Blois (34:38.222)
Right.

David Blois (34:51.438)
Yeah.

David Blois (34:56.462)
Yes, certainly. I mean, it's probably quite relevant for M&A advisors as it is for consultants, you know, because often guys like us, we start off with a particular skill set, be it finance or sales, and you work in that sector and you end up advising clients on finance or sales.

there's much more to it than that really and truly. You have to think about what's called being a trusted advisor. There are certain situations where you have to say to a client, you have to give a client bad news. You have to say, actually, although you like this deal, I don't think it's right or whatever. So you have to become a trusted advisor. It's a bit like our

situation where we say there's got to be chemistry, culture and a good proposition. We don't see ourselves as salesmen. When I take a client on, I'm not there, I suppose, I wouldn't describe myself as a broker. I'm not there just to see his business sold. I want for him the right solution, something that really works and also something that I believe is going to work.

because I kind of have to sign that off at the end of the day that my client's got a good solution. I want to have happy clients. So one of the books that is quite relevant to that, there is a book called The Trusted Advisor and it's written by a guy called David Maester and he talks about those things and he tells you, the people that are

the readers that you sometimes have to make sacrifices for your clients to make sure they have the right decision and I think the essence of that book is worth reading. So it's The Trusted Advisor by David Maester MAISTEL

Adam (36:59.036)
Ask-

Adam (37:03.86)
That's great, David. I'll put a link to that in the show notes afterwards. Thank you very much. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to say before we wrap up?

David Blois (37:09.422)
Great stuff.

David Blois (37:15.374)
No, I think we've covered quite a lot of the process. If anyone's got any questions on the process or would like to talk to me about anything in the M&A front, I'm on LinkedIn and always welcome to have a chat. No problem at all.

Adam (37:31.116)
Excellent, yeah, please reach out to David if any questions and thank you again David for joining us on the Fractional CFO show and really appreciate your insight and time today. Thank you.

David Blois (37:41.55)
Thanks for inviting me Adam, much appreciated, I've enjoyed it.