Mergers and Acquisitions Practice Group

Expert M&A Support for Leaders Navigating Growth, Transition, or Exit

Whether you’re exploring a strategic acquisition, preparing to sell, or navigating a merger or spin-off, you need more than legal and financial paperwork—you need experienced advisors who understand the full lifecycle of a deal. We partner with business owners, executives, and boards to help plan, negotiate, and execute transactions that align with your goals and maximize value. Post-close, we stay involved to support integration, retention, and operational continuity.

How We Help

You’ll benefit from our deep experience representing both buyers and sellers across a wide range of industries and deal structures. We provide high value, targeted services to both buyers and sellers who are contemplating or are involved in an acquisition, sale transaction, spinoff, or merger of two or more companies. We work with company leaders to plan for, negotiate, and execute M&A transactions and provide critical expertise and judgement related to a wide range of post-closing integration and retention challenges. With years of M&A experience with both buyers and sellers, we ensure buyers get the desired value from each acquisition and sellers are fairly compensated for their business.

Reasons to Consider Acquisitions

  • Gain economies of scale and market share with their core business and existing product offerings. Such acquisitions occur when one company acquires another company in the same industry, working at a similar production stage. The combined entity enjoys a cost advantage and better pricing power than did the independent entities.

  • Add products to its product line, which enables the company to increase revenue and profit by being able to increase revenue from each of its existing customers. This type of acquisition can also occur when a buyer faces a technology change in its core business and needs to acquire a new technology/product platform in a short period of time to maintain its revenues with existing customers, and to stay competitive in its markets.

  • Add customers for its existing products. This type of acquisition typically occurs when an acquiring company wishes to add a new geography to its market footprint. This type of acquisition might be a domestic (home market, e.g., US) transaction or an international endeavor.

Reasons to Sell Companies

  • They lack the management bandwidth or capital (or both) to continue growing their company organically and don’t have the skills, interest, or access to capital to be a buyer.

  • They face serious competitive threats that they are unable to address with existing resources and talent. This type of acquisition is done to preserve shareholder value and generate liquidity, thereby avoiding a reduction in shareholder value that might occur if they continue the "go it alone" approach.

  • Their owners and/or investors desire liquidity for their ownership interests. This type of acquisition is typically done when there are outside investors in a privately held company who want liquidity, or for a closely held (e.g., family-owned) company without a feasible succession plan.

Who We Serve

Buyers

Buyers typically are concerned with identifying appropriate targets, initiating discussions with the targets, performing due diligence, determining an appropriate valuation, securing financing, deal structuring and negotiation, and post-acquisition integration. Our partners help focus the efforts at each stage of the process and “burn the midnight oil” as the process unfolds to ensure a successful conclusion. Because we’ve seen successful and unsuccessful acquisitions and we are not commission-based investment bankers, we provide a “reality check” at each stage of the process: to help management determine whether or not to proceed and to adjust the valuation based on due diligence. In our experience, some of the best mid-market acquisitions are acquisitions not made, or ones witha final valuation different than originally anticipated.

Sellers

Sellers typically are concerned with positioning the company for sale, articulating both the financial and strategic value of the company to potential buyers, identifying and marketing the company to appropriate targets, initiating discussions with the targets, building out a comprehensive “data room” so buyers can conduct due diligence, deal structuring and negotiation, and post-acquisition integration. As we work with buyers, we provide a “reality check” at each stage of the process – to help management and owners determine whether or not to proceed. We also amass significant human resources to address the “peak demands” for documentation, analysis, or negotiation that are often associated with acquisitions.

Capabilities

For both buyers and sellers, we perform Quality of Earnings (QE) studies and analyses.

Services for Buyers

  • Collaborate with management and ownership to develop an acquisition strategy aligned with their growth objectives and with the corporate vision.

  • Assist management and ownership to identify suitable acquisition targets.

  • Collaborate with management and investment bankers (if they are being utilized) to engage with chosen acquisition targets to determine initial fit, financially, culturally, and technologically.

  • Develop due diligence approaches, due diligence checklists (for sellers to fulfill) and assess the due diligence materials in the context of acquisition viability and intended valuation.

  • Write due diligence reports for review by management and ownership.

  • Advise management and ownership with respect to initial deal terms, participate in negotiations as relates to Term Sheets, Definitive Merger Documents, and Retention Agreements.

  • Advise management and ownership on deal financing options, engage with lenders or other sources of financing when requested, and assist management and ownership in the negotiation of loan terms.

  • Collaborate with management and ownership to develop a written integration plan that ultimately is shared with appropriate managers at both the buyer and seller companies.

  • Assist management and ownership in developing pro forma financial projections for the first 3 years following the acquisition, including synergies expected to be realized.

  • Identify key executives and managers at the selling company who should be asked to sign employment agreements and non-competition agreements, and develop compensation arrangements to encourage retention after the acquisition is consummated.

  • Advise management and ownership as it relates to post acquisition organization structure, identifying organizations that can be combined/optimized and organizations that should stay separate.

Services for Sellers

  • Assist management and ownership to identify suitable acquisition targets.

  • Collaborate with management and ownership to develop a one-page (“teaser”) description of the company’s business and a long-form company presentation deck (aka “Confidential Information Memorandum – CIM”) which describes the company’s markets, product, and business in detail, presents the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis, highlights the management team capabilities, and describes the company’s forward product and business strategy and financial projections.

  • Develop for review and discussion with management a valuation model to use in negotiations with buyers which includes financial elements (e.g., DCF), but which also includes comparables analysis and strategic intangibles that a buyer would receive form acquiring the company.

  • Assist management and ownership in populating a comprehensive data room for due diligence purposes, and in anticipating the due diligence requests from prospective buyers.

  • Assist management in reviewing the past three years’ financial statements for accuracy, and in the “recasting” of financial statements if necessary (typically applicable to closely held or family owned businesses).

  • Advise management and ownership with respect to initial deal terms, participate in negotiations with buyers as they relate to Term Sheets and Definitive Merger Documents.

  • Advise management on identifying the employees that are critical for retention post-acquisition, and develop retention plans to encourage their continued employment post-acquisition.

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Build a High Performing Team

Whether your business is growing, transforming, or in need of change, finding the right people quickly is critical. Our recruiting services give you direct access to experienced recruiters and advisors who understand your industry, your challenges, and the kind of talent it takes to move your business forward. Whether you're filling a key executive role, backfilling staff during a transition, or building out a new team, you’ll get tailored recruiting support without the overhead of a traditional search firm.

You choose the model that fits: executive search, contingency recruiting, or interim and project-based staffing. Every search is grounded in deep operational knowledge from across the 2GO Advisory Group—so you’re not just hiring quickly, you're hiring wisely.

Sell-side Engagement Example:

For The Detection Group (thedetectiongroup.com), a 2GO partner initiated acquisition discussions with Watts Water Technologies (watts.com, $2B revenue, NYSE:WATTS) and secured an initial conceptual agreement with the EVP of Corporate Development. The 2GO partner led due diligence and contract negotiations, prepared forward financial projections, negotiated employee retention agreements, and contributed to post-acquisition integration planning. The final $9M cash sale was 50% higher than the original offer.

Sell-side Engagement Example

For Interop (interop.com), a 2GO partner led all acquisition discussions and negotiations, resulting in a $23M sale to Ziff Davis Publishing, a privately held $700M company. The deal included employee retention and bonus agreements, as well as deferred payments tied to five years of post-acquisition performance. Six years later, Ziff Davis resold Interop—along with two subsequent acquisitions—for $200M to Japan’s SoftBank Group.

Buy-side Engagement Example:

For Macrovision Corporation (now TiVo), a 2GO partner led negotiations for the $200M acquisition of Globetrotter Software, Inc., an electronic software licensing company with 125 employees in the U.S. and Europe. The partner conducted due diligence, including customer interviews, and collaborated with the sellers’ management to develop a five-year pro forma financial projection. They also negotiated the $20M acquisition of Globetrotter’s European distributor (20 employees, $5M revenue), ensuring a unified global organization post-acquisition. As a Nasdaq-listed company with a $2B market cap, Macrovision required both shareholder approval and Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance, all successfully achieved.

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