Book – Unlocking your company’s value

I found a really interesting book: Unlocking your company’s value. It is one of the few books that rightfully targets successful entrepreneurs (in other words, still entrepreneurs, but more than just “I have an idea”). It explains how an Exit “really” happens. Still more interesting, it has a perspective on our geographical area, meaning that everything he says there doesn’t apply only to the US, it goes for us, Eastern Europeans, as well.

I have known Les (the author) for a few years now – the guy lives in Hungary and he’s been doing this for years: helping entrepreneurs sell their companies, with all necessary steps that we can also find in the book:

• Understanding personal reasons;
• Monetization alternatives – Exit, IPO, Merger, Grow, Management Buyout, Refinancing, ESOP, Liquidation – understanding all of them and choosing the right option;
• The team to help you – Legal advisor, Accountant, Tax expert, Financial Consultant;
• What you have to do before in order to prepare a transaction – Corporate Governance, BP, Valuation, Tax planning, Exit Marketing Strategy, Timing, Contingency Plan;
• • Managing the transaction itself – Competitive Process or Opportunity, Due Diligence, Offers, Structuring, Termsheet, SPA, Negotiation.

I have picked up some items from the table of contents here, but the book is overall extremely interesting: it puts all the notions related to exit in a perspective higher than “for dummies”, but lower than the level of an MBA course, both the hard concepts – definitions, advice, and the soft ones related to the difficult decisions in the life of an entrepreneur. All in all, I think that the topics with which the book begins are worthy of in-depth study:

• A successful exit is always spontaneous but it appears as a result of a carefully prepared process;
• Entrepreneurs underestimate the effort and the need for planning required by an exit;
• In general, there is a large discrepancy between the evaluation of the company by the entrepreneurs and the evaluation of the company by the investors.

No doubt Les wrote the book to promote himself and his consulting company Europhoenix, but if his company can do everything he writes about here that it should be done, then perhaps it is really worth it. In any case, the book is a “must read”. I understand he is now translating it and in fall it’ll be available in bookstores in Romanian, but I think that, especially in the IT industry, reading a book about exits in English is a good first step ☺. Anyway, most of the terms will be untranslatable…

(English version by Teodora Popescu)