Adjusted
A Newsletter for Deal Pros
"Rising markets typically bring greater risk tolerance, fear of missing out and lapses in due diligence, which help create 'fertile soil' for potential wrongdoing."
- Howard Marks
The Crux
Addition Through Subtraction
A multi-location gas station operator had a $300 million LOI in hand and asked an advisory team one question: is this fair? Instead of answering, the team pulled the business apart location by location and found that the strongest sites alone produced more than double the cash flow of the whole. The deal that closed was three times the original offer. A case study in why buyers pay for the quality of earnings, not just the quantity. Read more
Origin Stories
Spanx
Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door-to-door when she cut the feet off her pantyhose to wear under a pair of cream-colored pants. Every hosiery mill turned her down. No patent attorney would take her seriously. She wrote the patent herself, modeled the product for Neiman Marcus in a ten-minute pitch, and was profitable in year one. Blackstone bought a ...
Risk & Return
Implementing Decision Gates
Most deals succeed or fail on two or three issues. The hard part is knowing which ones before you have spent the budget. Decision gates force-rank the pillars of the investment thesis so diligence runs serially, with the deal-killers first and everything else waiting until they are cleared. Read more
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The Art of Asking Good Questions
How to Avoid Canned Responses
Your interview subject has prepared for you as carefully as you have prepared for them. Five tactics for getting past the rehearsed answers, including the ten-minute Gorbachev interview that ran to thirty because the interviewer asked about his father instead of the Cold War. Read more
Recommendations & Reviews
How Big Things Get Done
Oxford's Bent Flyvbjerg studied thousands of mega projects to learn why most run over and a few do not. His answer, think slow and act fast, maps directly onto deal work, where process timing almost always pushes the opposite way. We pull out what applies to M&A teams, including why you can only ever pick two of cost, speed, and ...
Writing Well in M&A
Planning Before Writing
Most writing problems are thinking problems. Part II covers what happens before the first sentence: building a key themes list, outlining by conclusions instead of topics, the pyramid principle, and why the first draft is supposed to be rough. If someone read only your outline, would they understand your recommendation? Read more
Habits That Create Value
Develop and Hone Your Craft
The second video in our series on the habits that separate professionals who get pulled onto the best deals from those who do not. Six minutes, worth the watch. Read more
I Wish I Had Known
I Wish I Had Known: Anthony Kousmanidis
A Senior Associate in FDD at Ironsides Advisory on the pressure to know everything early in your career, why he tells new staff to ask every question, and how shadowing during downtime accelerated his development more than anything else. Read more
