The act of planning allows you to think ahead

… 3, or 4 steps even. When you get in the fog of war, All sorts of crazy shit goes on. It's easy to act emotionally. But if you put together a plan, it has forced you to think about all the alternatives that could possibly happen when you get into battles. So, again, as we walk through the pre-planning process, you are thinking about the end of mine, which is taking an asset that has no price on it, right?

It's going to be arrived at the bargaining table. I don't care what management thinks it's worth. I don't care what I think it's worth. At the end of the day, the market is going to set this price. There's no objective price for a business. It is subjective. It depends on the narrative that I use, how I take that business through process, and how I use leverage to push up the price, get full price discovery, and at the end of the day, end up in a position where we've gotten full price discovery and we can't eat one more penny out of that transaction.

SIN

So, as we move forward with pre-planning, we've now understood the asset, we can begin to put together the SIN with a confidential information memo, which is simply a sales tool. It is a deck that actually explains the operational and financial information on the company. Sometimes it's 20 pages, sometimes it's 100 pages, depends upon the size and complexity of the business, but it's the primary selling tool for a formal sell-side process.

And so, as we're assembling the SIN, and we're putting together the buyer universe, and we're doing all the research on the buyers, now we can start to think about choice of process. And before I get into choice of process, I want to take a step back to part one of our series here, and I want to talk about some of the ingredients and the concepts in a formal sell-side process.

At the end of the day, we're trying to take a business that has no price, right? There's no price tag on it, and we're trying to push, pedal to the metal, and eat every penny out of this, but we don't know what the price is, we don't know where it's going to end up. We've kind of done some math, right? We're going to assume right now that we're operating in buoyant, dynamic markets, and it's a great time to sell, but we really don't know what that business is ultimately going to sell for until we get to that point.

But, as I said in our prior session, we can be aspirational. And so what I typically do, we'll come up with an evaluation range, which I think is reasonable. And I say, okay, it's going to be from X to Y, and if all things go well, if lightning strikes twice, we'll get to Y. And then I'm going to push north of that, and that's going to be my target.

I'm going to get ridiculous. I want to be like a kid. I want to ask for my cake and my candy. I don't want to eat my broccoli. I want everything. This is what I'm going to shoot for as I start to put together my plan.