Preparing Your Company for a Big Sale

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Inc.雜誌授權 By Jeremy Quittner
一間公司怎麼在被買進之後三年內身價漲10倍？美國Inc.雜誌報導了房貸服務公司Accurate的演進，創業必讀！

Figuring out the appropriate exit point from your small business-assuming you want one-is tricky enough. What's harder is getting your company in shape for a sale.

Most businesses get stuck at a growth inection point, where they are doing well enough, but not really growing. Taking the next step requires putting new systems in place and, often, additional management. I recently proled the sale of Accurate Group, a once-sleepy residential mortgage-services company purchased by Evolution Capital, a boutique private-equity rm, in 2009 and sold three years later for more than 10 times the original sale price. Its three-year growth trajectory has a lot of things to teach entrepreneurs who may be curious about what they need to do to be attractive to a potential buyer, whether that's another business, or in Accurate's case, to a second private-equity rm.

Evolution was in the business of nding diamonds in the rough. In Accurate, it had spotted a number of “essential factors for all the businesses it bought: It was in a promising industry--real estate servicing; it had a unique technology that set it apart, it was not capital-intensive, and it had healthy cash ow, which meant the company could unlock its own growth.”

The primary goal that Evolution's managing partners Brendan Anderson and Jeff Kadlic had when they acquired Accurate, which was doing business primarily in North Carolina at the time, was to turn it into a national company."Real estate is always changing hands, and you don’t have to own or invest in it’ to prot from it." Jeff Kadlic, a managing partner and founder of Evolution says. 

Distinguishing Technology 
Accurate had a system called Magellan, which could keep track of the high-volume transactions of thousands of appraisers, underwriters, title searchers, and closing agents involved in mortgage transactions. It could keep track of the paper-intensive workow, quickly allowing the company to fulll and close orders. There were fewer than 10 licenses for the system software out there. Paul Doman, whom Anderson and Kadlic brought on to lead the company because of his expertise in the market and familiarity with Accurate's owner, knew that with the right coders he could build it out and give it a proprietary spin.

After 20 years in banking and mortgage services, many of those spent at First American Financial Corp., one of the largest mortgage-transaction services companies in the U.S., Doman was eager to try his hand as an entrepreneur. He'd managed to turn a sleepy home-equity unit at First American into a $100 million enterprise with 500 employees, in just a few years. And now, at 51, the time was ripe. "Magellan was created for a residential mortgage services type of business, but we knew we could enhance it greatly to meet Accurate's needs," Doman says. Magellan also made Accurate's service "sticky," meaning it required any bank that used it to install it in its back ofce, which required several months of work. So there'd also be little incentive to unhook once it was in and working properly. And that meant ongoing revenues from customers.

A Big, Fragmented Market
And though real-estate transaction services is also a highly fragmented market, amounting to about $17 billion in the U.S., Accurate had less than one percent of that. So there was huge potential to grow by leading or taking business away from competitors. 

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