Mergers & AcquisitionsHeadquartered in Switzerland. Advising buyers and sellers worldwide.
B2B Capital – M&A advisory for founders, owners and acquirers. For the founder, it’s years of work on the line. For the buyer, it’s a Tuesday.
Professional buyers approach acquisitions with established processes – it’s another day at the office. For founders, a sale is a defining moment for the company they’ve built.
We know how buyers think.
For us, it’s Tuesday too. We’ve built and sold businesses ourselves, and we’ve worked on transactions from both sides of the table. We bring that experience to your side – from preparation and positioning through to negotiation.
We have been the founder, seller, buyer, banker, lawyer and investor.
We represent buyers and sellers.
Whether we’re guiding founders through the sale of a business they’ve built or helping acquirers identify and secure their next opportunity, we bring experience from both sides of the table to every mandate. We work for one party in each transaction, with our advice, strategy, and negotiations focused entirely on their interests.
Nobody asked us, as founders, what a win was. So it is the first thing we ask you.
When we sold our own companies, not one of our advisers had ever been a founder selling theirs. They knew M&A. But they didn’t know what it is like to build a company and sell it at the same time – and they had no idea what a win looked like for us.
Travis Callahan, on the advisers he hired to sell his own companies
So we start somewhere else: not with what your company is worth, but with what the win of wins is for you – full cash and out, protecting the people who built it with you, or staying to build something bigger with someone else’s balance sheet. That answer changes the buyer list, the structure, and sometimes whether you should sell at all.
A win has three parts – price, structure and legacy. A buyer negotiates the first two – and uses structure to take back what they conceded on price. Nobody at the table argues for the third unless you brought someone who has lived it.
Four things we build into every process – and put in writing.
You already wear every hat. Do not take on one more.
You are the founder, the chief executive, the person who signs things and the one everybody asks. Then a sale asks you to be a sell-side M&A adviser on top of all of it – across the table from people who do it for a living. That fourth role is ours, and the process is built to take days of your time, not months.
Your company does not have one valuation. It has a market of them.
A buyer does not pay what your company is worth in the abstract. They pay what it is worth to them – capability they cannot build in time, customers they cannot reach, data they do not have, consolidation they would rather lead than follow. The financials set the reference range. The buyer decides how far beyond it a rational number can go.
Which is why an inbound offer is only one point in a distribution you have never seen. In the most recent private-M&A sample we have found – 60 Australian private-company sales reviewed by the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills in its 2024 study – 78% were sold to a single bidder. One reader. One number. Nothing to compare it to.
Before any buyer knows your name, we build your valuation – institutional grade, defended, and yours.
Comparable multiples. Precedent transactions. Discounted cash flow. Then, buyer by buyer, who could rationally pay above that range – and why. It is built in the first month, once your documents are in; it is part of the mandate, and it is yours to keep.
It changes who sets the anchor. Every buyer arrives with a number and a story for it; you arrive with yours. Every offer is measured against a range we can defend across the table. You know where to negotiate, where to walk away – and sometimes whether to sell at all. And it is what lets us say, with evidence, not yet.
Every priority buyer is approached with a documented case, built around how that buyer actually makes acquisition decisions.
The same company. Sold twice. Eighteen months apart.
A strong, growing company received one unsolicited offer. A lawyer, a success-fee-only adviser, and a single bidder who had already decided what the business was worth. No competing buyer was ever contacted.
€12M
The new owner decided to sell the same business. They hired us. We built the buyer map, wrote the thesis, and ran a full competitive process – the company reached the market properly for the first time.
€38M
Same company. Eighteen months. €26 million apart.
€12 million was one buyer’s answer; €38 million was what a market produced eighteen months later. Nobody can tell you what a market would have produced the first time, because nobody ran one – not us, and not the founder who sold. That is the point. You can renegotiate price. You can renegotiate terms. You can stop a weak process and start again. The one thing you never get back is the buyer you never tested.
Many of our clients arrive exactly this way: one offer, one buyer, a deadline. What happens next is not magic. We build the valuation, map every buyer who could rationally want the company, and run a full professional process – and the buyer who made the first offer is welcome to win it, at a number they now have to beat rather than set.
But one offer is not a market. One buyer prices your company against their alternatives; a market prices it against yours.
When the offer on your table is the right one, we will say so. Most M&A advisers have every incentive to turn “considering” into “selling”, and ours is the same incentive.
Have an offer on your desk? Send it to us before you answer. We will tell you, in plain terms, whether we would take it, test it or compete it – under NDA, at no cost, before any engagement.
Thinking about selling, but no offer yet? Talk to us before you choose the buyers. We will show you who could rationally value your company differently – and whether a process is worth running at all.
Sources – 86%, 76%, 32% and 67 hours: B2B Capital completed-mandate data since 2020; method on request. Baselines: SRS Acquiom 2024 (59% of earn-outs pay anything; ~21 cents per dollar; ≥28% contested) · Herbert Smith Freehills · Liu, Officer & Tu · Gorbenko & Malenko. Full sources and limitations →