Understand the transaction. Then interrogate the evidence.
Everything here exists to make one decision better informed: whether, when and how to sell – and, for an acquirer, whether, what and how to buy. Most of it was written from the seller’s chair, which is exactly why a buyer should read it: the chapters on buyers, valuation, diligence and integration describe the table you will be sitting at, and the buy-side mandate describes our side of it. Start with the question you actually have.
Ten minutes for the transaction, an hour for the decisions, eight chapters for the machinery.
Start with what you need
Selling
The Founder’s M&A Reference: the transaction from first thought to final wire, eight chapters, every number sourced. Open it →
Buying
Written from the seller’s chair, which is why an acquirer should read it: how buyers decide, how value is set, what diligence tests, what happens after the wire – and our side of that table.
Verify us
Where every figure on this site comes from, what it measures and what it does not. Sources & evidence →
What do you need to understand?
The transaction, from first thought to final wire – in eight chapters.
Ten minutes to understand the transaction, an hour to understand the decisions, and the machinery when you want it. Every number carries its source and its limits; statements without one are practitioner judgment, and say so.
- 01How a company is soldHow leverage moves, stage by stage →
- 02Who buys, and how they decideHow strategic and financial buyers decide →
- 03How a company is valuedWhat the company is worth – and to whom →
- 04Deal structure, from headline to wireWhy the headline is not what you keep →
- 05Due diligenceWhat seven teams will test, and how a finding becomes money →
- 06The documents and approvalsWhat binds, what moves money, what can stop a deal →
- 07Integration & legacyWhat changes after the buyer owns the company →
- 08GlossaryEvery term, searchable →
Why different buyers value the same company differently.
Strategic Value Dispersion
A buyer does not pay what a company is worth in the abstract; it pays what ownership enables for it. The concept defined precisely, the mechanism, why it is not “just get more bidders”, and what we are measuring across our own mandates.
Read the concept note →Research notes
Findings from our own transaction data, with the method and the sample stated. They publish when the sample can carry the finding, and not before.
In preparationHow we know what we know.
Every material figure on this site says where it came from, what it measures, and what it does not prove – and the five figures we publish about ourselves are defined once, in the terms they are counted in. Sources & evidence →
Three kinds of writing, kept distinct.
For journalists and researchers
Everything here is reusable with attribution.
No form, no embargo, no approval step. Every figure we publish carries its source, its period, its basis and its limitations, and where we could not verify a widely repeated statistic we say so and publish the trace instead. If a number here is wrong, we would rather hear it from you than not.
Who to ask
- Named contact
- Travis Callahan, founding partner – travis@b2bcapital.ch
- Response
- Within 24 hours, including to say we do not know.
- On the record
- By default. We will tell you if something has to be background, and why.
How to cite us
- Attribution line
- “B2B Capital, M&A advisers, date of publication” – with a link to the page carrying the method.
- Licence
- Quote, excerpt and reproduce our charts with attribution. No permission required.
- Corrections
- Published in place, dated, with the previous version noted rather than removed.
What we will not give you
- Client names
- Ever, without written client consent.
- A number we cannot source
- Including several the industry repeats daily. Ask and we will show you the trace.
- A comment on a live process
- Ours or anyone else’s.
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The Evidence Standard
How we know what we know – every external claim this firm makes carries a provenance, and this is the published system.
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Strategic Value Dispersion
The concept our research programme is built to measure – stated precisely, with what the evidence does and does not establish.
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Research Note 01: Indicative Bid Dispersion in European Technology M&A
Publishes when the sample supports it, and not before. That restraint is the Evidence Standard at work.
The research letter. New research and letters, when they exist – typically several times a year, never weekly, nothing else. You subscribe by e-mail and you leave by e-mail: one line, honoured the same day, no sequence to escape.
How we know what we know
Every external claim this firm makes carries a provenance. This page is the system – published, because an evidence standard you can't inspect is just an adjective.
Every number carries its source. Every source carries its tier.
Firm standard Every number on this site and in every document we produce carries one of these five tiers. No tier, no publication.
What this page does
Every material figure on this site tells you three things.
Three things follow. Market data is never presented as our data. Prior-career transactions are never presented as our mandates. An association is never quietly turned into a cause.
Our own figures, as defined – and where each one matters.
Five figures on this site are counted from our own mandates; the team’s prior-career figures are attributed where they appear. Each of the five is defined here once, in the terms it is counted in; the denominators are available on request.
- 34
- Companies sold as sell-side adviser since 1 January 2020 – signed and completed, funds transferred. Not mandates, not letters of intent. As of September 2026.
- 86%
- Of the letters of intent our clients have signed since 2020, the share that reached completion.
- 76%
- Of the earn-outs our clients have agreed since 2020, the share paid in full at final settlement.
- 32%
- Average final price above the valuation expectation each founder documented with us at signing, across completed mandates.
- 67 hours
- Founder time across a whole mandate – the counted average across every completed mandate since 2020, from our own time records.
Two axes, not one ladder.
Every substantive claim we publish is classifiable on two independent dimensions – because a perfect source can still be used to make a bad inference, and our own observations can be accurate but statistically young.
| Axis | Levels |
|---|---|
| Source basis | S1 – audited, contractual, official or primary documents · S2 – reputable published datasets and peer-reviewed research, with transparent method, cited with their limitations · S3 – practitioner and commercial evidence, attributed · S4 – our own internal observation or management representation, labelled as such |
| Claim type | O – observed fact · R – relationship (things that move together, without a causal claim) · C – causal claim (held to the highest bar, and rare in our work) · I – inference or judgment, marked as ours · X – illustration, labelled illustrative |
A published finding might be S2/R: a credible external dataset, making a relationship claim. A process observation might be S4/O: our own data, an observed fact, with its basis stated and the full method available on request. What you will not find is a causal claim standing on an S4 source.
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Attribution classes.
Every proof point states whose it is: a firm transaction, a partner's prior-career work, a team aggregate, a client's outcome, or market data. The categories are never blended. When you read "our senior team has closed more than $40 billion of transactions," the attribution is stated in the same sentence – deliberately, and permanently.
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Sample honesty.
Our own transaction sample is young and growing. Every figure drawn from it names its population and its eligibility rule; the denominator is available on request. No finding is generalised beyond what the sample carries, and none of these figures is a prediction for an individual mandate. A small honest dataset beats a large implied one.
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Corrections and versions.
Published pieces carry publication and revision dates. Material corrections are noted in the piece, not silently overwritten. Methodology changes are announced, not smuggled.
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What this costs us.
Sometimes the evidence supports a narrower claim than the market would prefer to hear. We publish the narrower claim.
The ABB acquisition programme, 2010–2014
The People page says Travis Callahan worked inside a corporate acquisition programme that took in forty-one businesses in five years, and names four of them. This is the whole list, so the claim can be checked rather than taken. It is ABB’s record, not B2B Capital’s: he was one of the lawyers negotiating and structuring inside it, as Group Vice President for M&A and Venture Capital (Senior Legal Counsel), not its chief executive, and no transaction below is presented as a mandate of this firm.
Thirty-three transactions were announced at group level in the window: twenty-two acquisitions of control, five divestitures, five minority or stake-increase investments, and one bid that lapsed. Fourteen disclosed a figure; nineteen did not, and are shown as undisclosed rather than estimated. ABB’s audited accounts record forty-one acquired businesses across the same five years – so roughly nineteen were small bolt-ons the group never announced separately. Cash spent on acquisitions, net of cash acquired, was $1,275M (2010), $3,805M (2011), $3,643M (2012), $897M (2013) and $58M (2014).
| Announced | Target or business | Country | Type | Consideration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Feb 2010 | Jokab Safety International AB | Sweden | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 29 Mar 2010 | Semiconductor business of Polovodiče a.s. | Czech Republic | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 5 May 2010 | Ventyx | USA | Acquisition | More than $1B (purchase price) |
| 17 May 2010 | ABB Limited (India), 52.11% → 75% | India | Stake increase | ≈ $965M (Rs 900/share) |
| 3 Jun 2010 | K-TEK | USA | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 8 Jun 2010 | Chloride Group PLC | UK | Bid lapsed | ≈ £860M – bid lapsed, never completed |
| 24 Nov 2010 | Aquamarine Power | UK / Scotland | Minority / stake increase | ≈ $13 m investment |
| 30 Nov 2010 | Baldor Electric Company | USA | Acquisition | $4.2B enterprise value ($63.50/share) |
| 10 Jan 2011 | ECOtality Inc. | USA | Minority / stake increase | $10 m investment |
| 16 Mar 2011 | Novatec Solar | Germany | Minority / stake increase | Undisclosed |
| 9 May 2011 | Mincom | Australia | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 12 May 2011 | Validus DC Systems | USA | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 1 Jul 2011 | Epyon B.V. | Netherlands | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 4 Jul 2011 | Lorentzen & Wettre | Sweden | Acquisition | SEK 750M / $119M |
| 11 Jul 2011 | Trasfor Group | Switzerland + Italy | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 15 Nov 2011 | Powercorp Pty Ltd | Australia | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 28 Nov 2011 | Envitech Energy Inc. | Canada | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 12 Dec 2011 | Newave Energy Holding SA | Switzerland | Acquisition | ≈ CHF 170M (CHF 56.00/share) |
| 14 Dec 2011 | GreenVolts Inc. | USA | Minority / stake increase | ≈ $20 m of a $35 m round |
| 30 Jan 2012 | Thomas & Betts Corporation | USA | Acquisition | ≈ $3.9B ($72.00/share) |
| 1–4 Jun 2012 | Tropos Networks Inc. | USA | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 22 Apr 2013 | Power-One, Inc. | USA | Acquisition | ≈ $1.0B equity value ($6.35/share) |
| 2 May 2013 | Los Gatos Research | USA | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 7 Jun 2013 | Dynamotive Ltd | UK | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 30 Jul 2013 | Alstom's ring motor business | Spain | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 5 Aug 2013 | Newron System S.A. | France | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 6 Sep 2013 | ELBI Elektrik | Turkey | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 8 Oct 2013 | Baldor's generator-set business | USA | Divestiture | Undisclosed |
| 21 Mar 2014 | Thomas & Betts HVAC business | USA | Divestiture | $260M, all cash |
| 28 Apr 2014 | Power-One Power Solutions business | USA + international | Divestiture | ≈ $117M |
| 27 Jun 2014 | Meyer Steel Structures (Thomas & Betts) | USA | Divestiture | $600M, all cash |
| 25 Jul 2014 | Spirit IT | Netherlands | Acquisition | Undisclosed |
| 20 Aug 2014 | ABB Full Service business | Global | Divestiture | Undisclosed |
Hold us to it.
Ask for the denominator behind any number on this site, or a reference call with a founder we sold for. We would rather lose a mandate than win it with a figure we cannot stand behind.