A sale of a business that goes from the buyer’s first introduction to the seller, to a signed letter of intent in just six days? It isn’t a typical deal, but we had one that actually unfolded that way. This is its story.
It begins with another sale: that of a heavily indebted flexible packaging company on the verge of bankruptcy. The owner, an inactive investor, focused only on top-line results and didn’t pay sufficient attention to bottom-line margins. As a result, profitability had dwindled to a point where the business was virtually worthless.
But the buyers saw something more.
They were a pair of very young, very high-energy entrepreneurs, and this was their first venture in the printing and packaging industry. They convinced the selling owner to enter an informal “sweat equity” arrangement that would give them ownership of the company in return for turning the business around to pay down its debts. That is exactly what they proceeded to do.
By dint of disciplined cost-cutting, a “whatever it takes” commitment to customer care, great salesmanship, and ferociously hard work, the partners brought the business back from the dead within their first year of ownership. By the time we met them, the company had been generating phenomenal organic growth — more than 50% — for almost four years in a row.
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