New Direction Partners

You've finally made it to the point in an acquisition where you can sit down with the seller and close the deal. This is the point at which we always urge our buying clients to pause, take a breath, and circle back to the essentials of the transaction.

In diplomacy, the motto for negotiators and peacemakers is “Trust, but verify.” The advice applies to M&A transactions between printing companies as well. Get the facts, confirm the understandings and be open about everything that the process discloses.

Negotiation is the most critical step in our six-stage journey toward a deal — the phase in which the transaction either comes together as the negotiators want it to or falls apart because their efforts have worn them out.

"I may not know everything, but I know what I like." We base many personal decisions on this bit of homespun wisdom, and more often than not, it leads us to the right choice.

As businesspeople, we always try to base our decisions on facts, numbers and logic. But, as ordinary humans, we also operate on emotion and instinct. In the year we’ve just entered, we should have plenty of opportunity to display both kinds of behavior.

Identifying a target for an M&A transaction is a mostly straightforward exercise. Buyers pick companies to acquire by first defining what they want the acquisition to accomplish. For sellers, finding appropriate buyers can be a bit more open-ended — but still achievable with the help of sound professional advice.

Probably no subject gets more attention from business writers and management gurus than strategy. That’s not surprising. Without a coherent set of objectives — a precisely defined goal to work towards — everything else is just going through the motions without actually getting anywhere.

The fast pace of transactions in 2016 tells us that the market is sound and many that are looking for opportunities to buy or sell have had little difficulty in locating them.

At New Direction Partners, we have found that closing a deal is almost always the culmination of a number of steps — six, to be precise — in a process that applies both to buying and to selling.

In our recent webinar, we were happy to report that the pace of dealmaking in the industry remains strong and that opportunities for buyers and sellers should continue to be abundant at least in the near term. How long these conditions will last is impossible to predict. For the moment, though, as M&A advisers, we like what we’re seeing.