Business Broker M&A Fees - Cost To Sell Your Business?

hey guys welcome back to another video today we're going to be talking about business broker fees or investment banking fees when selling your business and this is a topic that's not covered a lot in the internet realm or discussed openly so i thought i'd make this video to give you my perspective as an investment banker in the lower mid market so my firm robbely we primarily focus on businesses between let's say one to fifty million dollars in value and so i can give you my take on the lower mid market and talk about the mid market in general so this video is going to cover really what the fee structures are what to expect and different ways to negotiate and understand the reasoning behind these fees so hopefully find some value here now investment bankers and business brokers are usually compensated on a contingent basis meaning that the majority of their compensation for the work that they do is tied to the successful closing of the deal and it's similar to a real estate agent they don't get paid until the sale gets closed and what this does is it aligns their interest with the business owner and who will only proceed with a deal that makes sense for them right so it differs greatly from the compensation that you know a lawyer an accountant will charge on an hourly basis because a business sale is a very long dated process it would not make economical sense for a seller to incur hourly rates for a business business broker or investment banker and the reason why is you know investment bankers take anywhere from nine to you know out worst 18 months to sell a company you know if you're on on an hourly rate for 18 months you can rack up a ton of fees with very little certainty around the deal closing so you always work with brokers that are aligned with you because high hourly fees are a way that communicates i want to get paid but i don't really care about the outcome of the deal whereas a success via contingent fee aligns the broker's interest with yours because if you don't close on the deal or you're not happy with the deal that they bring to you then they're not going to get paid so they're working to make sure that they deliver on your expectations the only difference where this doesn't apply the contingent fee structure is when there's a turnaround situation or where you know a bankruptcy say for example a company goes through a bankruptcy you know there's no real ev enterprise value to to tie a fee to so it's really more of an hourly consulting engagement but for traditional sales where you're selling in the open market you know it's a contingent fee is is necessary and recommended now as i said lawyers and accountants do not operate on this basis simply because from their perspective when they get involved the deal's already kind of ironed out the buyers at the table and there's a lot more certainty of close whereas with the business broker they get involved very early on in the process sometimes years before the business actually sells so for for the seller it makes more sense just to tie it on a contingent fee basis now before we actually jump in i would rather we talk about why you should pay a broker and be cognizant of the fact that i myself am an investment banker in this space and there may be some bias but i'm going to try to give you some really good reasons to understand why and and especially if you hire a good broker it is the equivalent of an insurance policy and i'll tell you why so like a policy you have the professional care and management of your sale by someone that's good and this is this that's why i underlined this this word good you want to make sure that you're dealing with someone that's competent that's experience because if if you do deal with someone like that they're going to make sure to take care of your confidential information so when you're going out to market and sourcing offers even if you're dealing with competitors that may use that information against you that advisor is going to know how to release that information in tibbetts not really give everything up front because if they're just tire kickers you gave away really the secrets to the castle and really for nothing whereas if you manage that process correctly you can deal with the competitor but still be fairly protective of your core information until the deal is very advanced to a place where the certainty of close is very high the other thing is time management you know you don't really appreciate the fact of how much work goes into meeting the buyers and answering their questions and the advisors for the 9 to 18 months that it takes to really sell a business so having a team in place will allow you to focus on running your day-to-day business while the broker works on your behalf to bring that deal to you and help it close and typically especially if you're a well you know profitable business with that's going to attract a lot of interest what the broker does is while you could try to sell your business and go to your local competitors or people that are in your network you know your neighbor at the cottage that said hey i'd love to buy your business kind of thing but with with a broker they have a very set network of financial and strategic buyers that they they can go to to create an auction and when you create an auction what that does is that it generates a lot of interest which pushes up the price of the business and the irony and i always say this when i meet with clients is that i'll probably push up the value of your business by by five ten fifteen percent and if my fee is only five percent you've netted the additional ten percent simply because you went with a broker instead of trying to do it by yourself so i think that's really important to understand and quantify that yes you're paying you know say for example five percent but the gain in the value of the business by going through an auction is actually more than the net cost to you of paying that advisor now as i mentioned before the other benefit is you know unlike an insurance policy where there's a cost that's fixed in in with when dealing with an investment banker a large portion of their fee is contingent on the deal closing so if they don't deliver a deal that you're comfortable in accepting or that doesn't meet your priorities there's very little cost that's incurred outside of maybe a retainer fee and really you get to understand what where the market thinks the value of business is you probably get some pretty good feedback on the company from an outside investors which you can then take repurpose and change your strategy and then go back to market a few years down the line and the cost to you is limited outside of the time that it took to meet those buyers that the advisor brought to you and then the last thing is it increases your odds of closing and this is really really important in most instances the deal doesn't fall through before the offer is at the table you know getting offers is one part but bringing that offer across the line is everything and that's why some people even pay advisors to get involved once an offer is at the table because the advisor what the advisor does is they play the quarterback role managing the emotions of the buyer and the seller engaging with professional advisors to make sure that their concerns are addressed the closing lawyers the accountants the banks and the lenders that are lending into the deal and managing all of that information flow all those questions they are on all those calls and going back to the time management point you don't have to be on those calls anymore because your advisor is there making sure that they're bringing the deal across the line so these are some of the reasons why you should pay a broker for some some fees now let's talk about contingent fees structures right not all fees are the same and depending on the geographic region the type of industry that you're in the size of your company and the types of brokers that your or advisors that you're working with there are a few fee structures i mentioned the flat fee the flat fee is very simple i'm paying you x amount of dollars to get the deal done and i only pay you x once a deal closes a modified version of that is i'll pay a flat fee but if you can get more value for me i'm also going to pay you a percentage bonus on that the third is a percentage fee and this is the most popular in my business this is what i use the most it's it's a flat percentage fee that allows you to really tie the fee to the value of the company and incentivizes the advisor to get more offers and a higher value to get a higher fee for themselves there's the old school lehman fee and then there's the reverse lehman fee the lehman fee is pretty dated i don't see it very often the reverse limit fee is actually the second most popular fee structure primarily in the united states not in canada because in canada you're going to see a lot of percentage fees whereas in the united states you're seeing the reverse limit fee used frequently so i'd say maybe about 40 50-ish percent of the time you'll see a percentage fee from brokers about 30 for the reverse and then the balance is a mix of fixed and flat and hourly and etc etc now outside of the contingent fee at the end of the deal there are also upfront fees that come with the deal the vast majority of deals the fees are going to be maybe 90 80 80 to 90 weighted on the back end contingent but there's also some upfront forms of payment that are required sometimes there's an upfront retainer and this varies from ten to seventy five thousand dollars for a mid-market company and sometimes it's refundable or credited against the uh the uh the fiat closing but in most instances i would say the upfront retainer is actually non-refundable and and what this does and and i always ask in my own situations for my business i ask for an upfront fee because from the broker's perspective it's a great way to get an understanding of how serious the seller is in wanting to go through this process i have been in countless meetings where i will say hey listen our contingent fee is five percent or six percent and you know we have an upfront fee of 20 000. and they the client hits me back with oh you know what if you bring me an offer i'll pay you five percent but i don't want to pay you the upfront hold on a second how many people have you told that to i'm probably working with 17 other people that you're speaking to right now saying the same thing which is you bring me an offer i have no real commitment to you no exclusivity to you as my advisor and i'll pay you if you bring it through but you know i don't really want to incur the upfront so that communicates a lack of seriousness so that's why a lot of brokers and advisors will ask for the upfront fee something less common is an expense reimbursement so this could include travel printing delivery costs and this usually works for industry specialists working with more international buyers you know usually there's a limit to the type of of expenses that are available for reinfor embarrassment without approval and then there's also an approval list where you know if you have incur above a thousand dollars in monthly expenses then you go to the owner and say hey listen this is what i incur this is the reason why i incurred it can you approve and sign off on reimbursing these expenses i would say for a lower mid market business you're not going to see expense reimbursements being required or needed and really the only real need for an expense reimbursement is if the broker is extending the geographic range of that buyer pool significantly so i'll give you a really good example you know we're selling a company that the buyers are actually based in japan but the company's based in canada so we justified that hey listen we may need to incur travel costs to go out and see those buyers and build that relationship so that is available as an expense reimbursement but everything else if we have before meeting for lunch with a buyer here in canada that's not considered a required expense under the reimbursement clause so it's give and take i would say you see this maybe only 25 30 of the time but in most instances you're not gonna see that the other thing that is very common an upfront retainer i'd say nine times out of ten you're going to see it and same thing with a monthly fee very free frequently the monthly fee is used to amortize a portion of the success fee and ensure that the client is committed to the process on an ongoing basis so the upfront fee usually pays for the costs of developing the cim the confidential information memorandum and the data room and the upfront cost of spending you know a month or two with the business owner learning their business as the advisor the monthly fee is an ongoing fee that gets incurred and amortized against the success fee as the the advisor goes out into market and starts meeting with buyers and sourcing offers and all that and and when i say amortize against the success fee what that means is that you know if say for example the front fee is 20 000 and then i have a five thousand dollar a month uh monthly fee the twenty thousand dollars a month is out of pocket you know regardless if the deal closes or not the the advisor is entitled to keep retaining that fee whereas with the monthly fee in most instances it's actually refundable and only if the deal closes is it credited against the success fee so you know if the the advisor took nine months to find an offer and give or take say for example the fee was one thousand dollars a month then he or she incurred nine thousand dollars up to the day of close which is deducted off the success fee of say a hundred thousand dollars so you've collected the 9 000 on a monthly basis for the nine months and then the 91 000 net fee is paid at the end of the deal now say for example you incurred nine thousand dollars for nine months no deal came through and you decided to terminate the agreement that nine thousand dollars if refundable would be paid back to the client or in some instances if it's not refundable it would still be held on to the uh by the advisor and so the net cost to you as the seller in attempting to sell your business was the upfront fee and the monthly fee but nothing else and it's obviously for nine months of work to pay 19 000 all in is nothing you know the advisor made nothing on that on on that engagement really the time they spent on the engagement was probably a lot more than that so that's why it works there's such an alignment to make sure that a deal gets done and across the line now let's talk about the flat fee structure first flat fees are very good fees when there's a probable buyer or group of buyers identified by the seller and what essentially the broker is doing is playing the role of deal closer and negotiator so there's no broad search in place it's not like you're he or she's knocking on a ton of doors to generate interest there's a set group of buyers that they reach out to and it allows them to quickly get that offer and get the deal closed and the flat fee structure obviously limits the incentive of the broker to seek more value for the business as they're not incentivized to fight for that extra dollar that a variable fee would allow them to so you know typically what what ends up happening is you don't see a lot of flat fees in general so sometimes what you'll see is you'll see a flat fee plus a little bit of a performance bonus and i'll give you a live example oops i'll give you a live example so you know dave owns a software business he recently received an unsolicited offer for 10 million dollars his accountant tells him hey listen you have to go find an investment banker to either a see if that offers good and b if it is good get it across the line and use someone that can negotiate on your behalf so the investment banker comes in there and they say hold on a second this 10 million dollars is really really good it's a competitor you know they're credible they have the ability to close i see this as a great way to really take this offer and try to get a bump on it maybe go back to market and get some more offers and try to get this competitor increase their offer so if the 10 million comes through my fee is x and it's fixed but if i get you an extra million dollars i want my fee to increase and to be a bit variable and i want 10 percent more on that fee now that percentage is i just picked it out of the air it could be five it could be you know seven two whatever it is but the point of the structure is that you know flat fees work really good when you set an upper threshold limit of saying you know in this scenario the market told you the business is worth 10. you bring in the broker and now you say listen if you can beat 10 i'll give you more but if you can't beat 10 then only pay you for the hours that it takes to close the deal negotiate it so it really works in that scenario now percentage fee structures are the most popular fee structure and it's commonly accepted across the industry and understood by all because it's very similar to the real estate agent type structure you know it's a variable fee i myself and my firm do the same thing where i would say 99.9 of the time you know a fixed percentage fee structure and what this does it aligns the broker with the client as they get a percentage of the deal value so negotiating and seeking a higher deal value results in a larger check for the broker and obviously the net value for the seller is also increasing so to give you a simple example if it was a four million dollar business ev we get an offer for four million dollars give or take it should be about a five percent fee on that which is a two hundred thousand dollar um you know net fee to the to the advisor now in this scenario you know if i get an extra million dollars on that that fee goes up to 250 000 so i'm not incentivizing closing the deal fast i want to go to market see what what the market dictates is the value of the business try to get more and push for more and obviously if we hit the upper threshold then you know the market says yeah i'm not going to pay more than four million dollars then close on that deal and get the 200 000 now one of the downsides that we typically hear i hear this all the time from accountants is that you know listen at the end of the day how much work does it take to get the first 3 million of that 4 million value and what that means is that especially for bigger businesses yeah obviously that business is worth at least 15 million dollars so you know what real work are you putting in to get me the first 15 yeah if you get me an extra you know five million dollars on top of that yeah you probably created an auction worked really hard to find the right buyer and get that extra five million dollars but the first 15 anyone would buy this thing for at least 15 million dollars so that's why sometimes people argue and say hey hold on a second with a fixed percentage fee the the broker the really the value that they're adding is the last three million dollars of the 30 million deal for example because the first 27 you're gonna get that from anyone anyways so that that that i think is one of the the complaints so my answer to that you know being in that room is that hold on a second anyways you would have paid a flat fee for a deal you know we go back to the other example where i would say fine you know pay a flat fee plus a variable comp on anything above that or just play pay a fixed percentage fee which would be the equivalent to the flat fee plus the variable so give or take it all nets out to the same i and i'll give you some market stats later on obviously if this thing was 15 to 4 million dollars you know the brokers grossly overcharging the client but at five percent give or take you would get the same net fee whether it was a flat or more of a fixed percentage but it is a fair argument to say how much work does it really take to get the first 27 of that 30 million dollar business now the lehman fee is another structure where it's unique in the sense that you know this was incorporated i think in the 70s and 80s in wall street when m a was a much smaller business and the success fee declines incrementally as the value of the business increases so what that means is if i get more and more dollars my fee my my fee on the extra dollars declines so on the first two million say for example i get five percent on the next two million and get four percent next three million i get uh three percent and on the remaining balance above six million dollars i'm only getting two percent versus just a flat fee now the traditional lehman fee is dated and i we don't see it frequently in canada i've never seen it actually and in the us it's very you know uncommon to see because the underlying assumption of this fee structure is that the market will drive the price higher not the broker so why should the broker be rewarded for the extra value that they generate as the value of the business increases now it puts an emphasis on the broker closing the deal getting the deal done but not getting a higher value because obviously why should i fight more if i'm only getting two percent you know realistically it doesn't really push the broker and and in the 80s it worked because auctions in the lower mid market were so limited there were so few buyers available it was like three or four people and you know that all the clients were saying was hold on a second all you're doing is delivering a service and going through the motions why should i pay you just generally for you know the increasing value of my business if the market and the rising tide lifts all boats but this just doesn't make sense nowadays nowadays the lorman market is so busy with a ton of buyers a ton of capital looking to buy businesses you know brokers should be incentivized it is in your interest as a seller to try to get your your broker to get more offers and increase the value of the business and pay them more because that's how you get them incentivized so that's why the reverse lehman fee exists and it's the exact flipped version of this on the first two million dollars or in the first first four million dollars you're getting two percent on the next two million dollars getting six percent and everything above six million dollars you're getting eight percent well hold on a second now if i bring in another million dollars i bring a seven million dollar offer on that extra million i'm getting 80 000 whoa that works and especially i would say in the you know kind of 10 to 50 million dollar business value range you know the multiples are such in flux you know because with small businesses it doesn't work there's not a lot of buyers and with mid market or large cap businesses the market's fairly set you kind of know where values are because you can see the publicly traded stock valuations as comparables but in the mid mid market if i were to call it that you know the 10 to maybe 100 million dollars multiples vary you know it could be four times it could be nine times so you know incentivizing the advisor to get more really works and so that's why the reverse lehman fee is actually the second most popular structure in the lower mid market today so in this scenario you can see an immediate difference in the comp you know if you get a five million dollar offer the reverse lehman fee would generate 140 versus 150k for a flat fee of 3 if you bring in an extra 3 million dollars the compensation all of a sudden outpaces the flat fee and now you're making 280 000 versus 240. so it incentivizes the advisor to get that extra three million dollars and it makes sense now there are some other things to consider when thinking about fees and meeting with brokers and and getting an understanding what the market is there my first comment right off the bat is don't be their smallest client so what that means is big established banks and investment banks are not going to be desperate for your business if you're a very tiny client if you're a mid-market client you need and make sure that you have the negotiating power and and find investment banks and business advisors that match the size of your business so say for example you know you wanted a deal with a jp morgan but you were a 10 million dollar enterprise value business jp morgan would look at that and say a either you're too small i wouldn't even take you on or b fine you're small enough you know you're big enough that i take you on we'll make some money on it but i'm not going to put my best best staff or my top guys on it you know you're going to be the bottom of the rung in terms of our priority list so i would say it's important to match the size of your business with the scale and prestige of the investment bank if you're a billion dollar business go ahead to jp morgan if you're a 10 million dollar business find a local investment bank that has experience in your sector and deal with them the other thing is read the fine print so a really important difference is that most sale engagements will have a tail and it is a common way for to protect brokers and investment bankers if a client terminates the agreement and then tries to sell to the same buyer six months down the line to skip out on the fee typically a tail is a way to make sure that hey listen yes i'll bring the buyer to you and if you close within one or two years with that same buyer i still get my fee because hey i brought that buyer to you and that was a brand new buyer that got to see your business and was interested in going through with it now just be cautious in the fact that the tail is not too long i've seen some situations where tales are three years or like five years and that's just way too prohibitive it's way too long we typically see anywhere from one to two years some of my engagements have tails of one year some have two years depending on the industry but i'd say one to two years is your standard and in general my my piece of advice with broker fees is don't be cheap you know don't don't don't step over the dollar to pick up the nickel because if you're trying to grind on fees as i said before you know you want to hire a broker that is very good high quality has experience in your sector because they're your insurance full policy a they'll take care of the process cleanly and handle it correctly and b if they're really good they'll probably push up the value your business and net the net impact to you is actually a positive i'll give you a good example so we actually were we were trying to sell this uh this business in canada was a six million dollar you know manufacturing business you know my firm robly goes in and we pitch against some of the big accounting firms you know ernst young pwc the like and so ernst and young and pwc for for them the size of the business was a little too small but they still got involved whereas for for my firm it was a perfect size that's the sweet spot we love these types of businesses and so i you know the way i communicated my fee structures as i said listen at the end of the day you know my six percent is the the simple message is i believe you think the business work is worth six million dollars slap on top my fee of six percent and then i need to beat that number and we did you know we we delivered almost uh i think it was a 8.2 million dollar offer that closed and the net impact to him was on top of that six percent he then probably walked away with an extra 1.4 million dollars so it was a you know it was obviously a good example of where you know when you kind of quantify the fee and the net impact of that fee to you as a seller why not pay that six percent create that auction get get buyer interest up and extract more value from the market so don't be cheap now what are some questions that you should ask brokers and advisors when talking about fees so the first one right off the gate is how many engagements are you working on and what that means is how many clients do you have today have a good understanding of their firm you know obviously look on their website and see how big their team is and if say for example they only have three people working for the for the company you know you want to kind of look at that and then compare their answer to the team that they have in place so if there's three people and they're working on 25 engagements man they're underwater there's no way that they're investing in allocating evenly time across all 25 engagements to do a good job so the busier they are though you know the challenge with that from a fee negotiation perspective is if they're really really busy they're probably a good or the market in general is really good and from their perspective they're probably less willing to negotiate on fees because obviously hey listen i'm not going to go drop my fees below what we typically sign clients up for if i'm so busy i got 25 other engagements i got to work on so it's a double-edged sword on the one hand you know it's a question of quality of service you know if they're very very busy but on the other hand from a fee negotiation perspective they probably are not going to drop their fees in most instances because hey listen i got all these other fees now say for example they're worried about the next dollar to pay for rent they're probably going to drop their fees so if they have a team of 10 and they're working on five engagements and you know they say oh you know the market's a little slower than usual then you probably have more negotiating power to say you know what i want to work with you and it will be a good thing for them but i actually want to drop my fees by you know percent or so and and you'll probably get away with it now another key question is the close rate you know what is your close rate on the deals that you've taken on in the last three years and you can ask that about the firm in general or about the individual representative that you're speaking to because they're probably going to be handling your file in most instances you know a standard average is 60 70 close rates if it's below that in general you should stay away from that advisor they're probably just taking you on getting the non-refundable retainers sitting on you for nine months the owner says hold on a second you've brought me no real decent offers terminate the contract and they walk away with just the retainer which some people totally do that you know we know some firms i won't name names but we know some firms that you will sign up literally a hundred clients a year take all the retainer fees walk away at two million dollars and gross incur very little cost because they didn't put in the work to source the source the buyers and that's they make a perfectly fine living off that now obviously eventually time will run out on that strategy but you know if you ask them their closing rate they will probably say it's in the 30s or 40 percent which means you should probably not deal with them because they'll do something like that to you not all the time but in most instances that is the case now the other thing is how many people do you expect to work on the file and what that means is are you if it's the entire firm it's only three people then you know it's it you know evenly if you split up that feed that's a lot of money for you guys but say for example they have a team of 20 and they're only dedicating two people to that team you know they will look at that and say either you want more people on the file in which case our fees will be bigger big teams equal bigger fees or i'll staff two juniors on your file and i'll keep the fees at the same rate but you're probably not going to get the best service so you got to be cognizant of how many people work on your file you know big teams equal big fees but if a big team staffing a lean team on your on your file you know you got to question the quality of service there as well and then the last thing is references when you when you're interviewing brokers or advisors always ask for references in general but when you're asking for references you know don't it's not proper etiquette to ask specifically for a fee and either way they've probably the past client has signed an nda with the broker so that they won't be able to disclose the fee but the key question i would ask if i was in your shoes is generally were you happy with the value that you received for the fees that you paid and that question is broad enough that it doesn't breach any ndas that the past client may have signed but it's enough to give you an indication of oh these guys were really happy oh yeah oh yeah totally no fine or it's like ah you know and they kind of hesitate you probably can read the room and seeing yeah they probably had a problem with the fees there so that's another really great way to get a perspective from a past client now the last portion of this of this presentation is going to just talk about the market statistics so firmex is a financial services company that really tracks the m a sector and since about 2016 they've actually published a free report you can go online firm x fee guide and you can pull the report itself and they put this report up and it's a fee fee guide comparing the the average fees across the lower mid market space typically for companies that are valued about 1 to 100 million dollars in value and in 2020 which you know is the report that i'm using they asked about 309 business brokers to share their fee structure and their average fees you know across north america so it's a really good kind of proxy to give you an understanding of where the market stands so i'm going to kind of drill in on two key areas the first is the structure as we discussed and you can see here you know the simple percentage which is that fixed you know four or five percent on ev there's the scaled percentage which is essentially the reverse limit and they didn't use reverse lehman here but it's essentially scaled you know two percent for the first two million four percent for the next two million six percent for the next two million kind of thing then there's the lehman formula as i said which is the flipped of that the declining scale and then there's other which could be a flat fee or whatever it is but you can see there's the other and the older school lehman formulas are not busy the two very popular ones are the simple percentage at 43 and the reverse lehman at 39 with the lehman are very very low now the other really good piece of information that this report shares with you is they identified the average success fee for various deal sizes and again this is based on 309 respondents from both the us and canada so on the left you'll see here the average value of the transaction so a 5 million company or 150 million dollar company and then there are different tiers based on the fee so give or take these are essentially the the the total fee relative to the value of the business so if you wanted to keep it simple you know it's a fixed percentage fee you know a fixed percentage fee for a five million dollar business the two most you know the highest percentage areas about 42 of all 5 million deals for these 309 people were four to six percent all-in fees which is super consistent with what i have like i can confirm this is dead-on you know i'm working on a four million dollar engagement where the fee is about 5.5 i'm working on a 17 million dollar engagement where the fee is four percent uh and then we had one passed engagement where the fee was two percent on a 40 million dollar transaction so this is dead on and these this is super valuable to kind of see hey where are the fees relative to what i'm where i'm seeing the the value of the business oops i'm just gonna push back here so as you can see you know a five million dollar deal if if broker is charging six to eight percent they're probably an industry specialist they're very busy they have the perfect buyer for you and it may be worthwhile to engage at that level but if they're a generalist that's taking on your engagement a four to six percent fee is a lot more realistic now as the value of the transaction increases you can just see you know there's there's almost that inverse relationship the value of the business increases the size of the feed declines proportionally so a hundred million dollar plus engagement is going to be in that one to two percent range at most very rarely are you going to see these fees go up to this level and the reason why is typically a larger engagement they have more negotiating power and the total value of the relationship to the investment bank is a lot more more right like there's going to be the wealth management business there may be the underwriting relationship to sell some bonds to the general market and the investment banks that work on these 150 million dollar businesses are not you know three guys working on small businesses you know it's it's a large professional investment banking corporation with a publicly traded markets group and a wealth management division and blah blah blah blah blah blah so you know really that's why these investment banks can justify charging lower fees on the success fee but winning more fees on all the other things that comes with the transaction so that's really it for today hopefully you found the video helpful if you have any questions just please comment below or if not you can reach out to me if it's more of a personal situation relating to your transaction you can reach out through linkedin or you can go to my website roblycapital and hit me up over her email if you found the video helpful please do like and subscribe to the channel i will be releasing more of this content m a commercial banking content in the future and also consider signing up for the finance get newsletter the link will be in the description of the video below and it will allow you to kind of keep keep up to date with the different case studies and businesses that i'm working on just in general for you know finance related type m a m a transactions so outside of that have a great day guys and take care