Corporate Transactions to shake up your everyday

Buying and Selling complex assets has been fraught since the beginning of the business, and there's no end to the imagination of deal makers as companies become more nuanced and harder to define. 

My career in commercial Monetization advised businesses either right after a major transaction or as the business is facing one (e.g. fundraising, initial public offering, or acquisition). 

I found that both within the operating company as well as for leadership, corporate transactions feel very different from commercial transactions. 

Company: Whose department is it ultimately?

For an executive facing review of two transactions on their desk, the corporate matter looms far larger, and the file looks more complex: all factors that is liable to make one doubt the addition of any two numbers let alone anything else more complex. While all transactions are legal decisions of consequence, the nuance in the corporate transaction is likely to feel more like butterfly wings always at risk of causing tornadoes in HR, compliance, legal, or IT. Hardest of all: a bad decision for a commercial client may cause us to regret company strategy for some time; a bad corporate transaction may hobble or stifle the company indefinitely. 

Investor / Acquirer: How ready do you feel?

Life's not a picnic for the investors or acquirers either: after the art + science + faith + wizardry that is true deal qualification -- now at the transaction is the moment of truth. Will all that work result in a thriving venture that, in a few short years, become the next winner of every market? Well... it's your business case, your drawn-out process, and all your advisors have made you sign away any hope of chasing them for failure. How ready do you feel?

Transaction Lawyers / Investment Bankers: 

This central advisory role in a corporate transaction is routinely split between expert attorneys, investment bankers, and other third-party service providers. All these folks are in business to carry the bridge in advance of the troops, and that includes one unavoidable challenge. Each stakeholder on each captable deserves their attention and quite possibly will be a trouble without it. This causes even simple "checks" to be quite an exhaustive process for all parties. These guys may be a bit of an adrenaline junkie but they've got a hard job. Give them a cookie, or ignore any random burst of misdirected emotion, if you encounter them. They're likely worried about someone who needs help and they've just remembered it. 

Merger Waterfall: Fast not frantic

Merger Waterfall Studio is our calm answer to a set of surprisingly hard and persistent challenges of trading large assets. 

1. Good initial ballparks enable faster closing: That first decision will anchor a lot - we focus on making that first decision easier with rapid on-the-go high-level terms modeling for a Company. Size that asset, model purchase price, estimate risks and make safe-enough deals to enable later diligence while moving towards closing quickly.

2. Shared source of truth enables confident tradeoffs: We build detailed models for a deal (e.g. after a signed Letter-of-intent is available) to fit the parties' actual context. This requires automatically reading contracts, captables and governing documents, as well as having expert legal and financial specialists securely contribute data to the model. Building this shared source of truth for a transaction makes your deal data functional for decision making and puts a lot fewer executives to bed. 

3. Summarize for insight to help human decision makers: There's a lot of stakeholders in a deal, and any one confused party is sufficient to slow the whole train down. We summarize deal data for each stakeholder role to fit their core decisions and the depth of information they need to make that decision. Deal makers can customize the information to include in a given deal or exclude stale data.

If you're a deal maker today or an enthusiast for the future - check out our platform! 

Cheers!

Ahsan Nawroj
Co-founder & CEO
Merger Waterfall Inc.