Articles & News

Ron Brasch and Una Ng-Brasch were recently recognized as the Business Arts Leaders of the year at the sixth annual Business and Arts Lunch. The lunch, co-presented by the Colorado Springs Regional Business Alliance and COPPeR, the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region, honors businesses and business leaders that support the arts and integrate arts and creativity into their companies. Ron Brasch is a Merger and Acquisitions Specialist at The FBB Group, Ltd., and Una Ng-Brasch works in the Education Department at Colorado College. Brasch is an award-winning poet who participates in the Smokebrush Foundation’s Story Project and the Pikes

The 2013 tax year will be a Brave New World for many closely-held business owners. A number of tax rates are increasing, depreciation incentives are ending, and then there’s the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Business owners face many new tax challenges in 2013. Business owners will want to identify how these many changes will affect both their business and personal taxes. New tax rate increases in 2013 The legislation early this year that added a new top bracket for higher-income individuals was well-publicized, but 2013 has a whole array of tax rate increases applying at varying income levels: New ACA

Although we will occasionally complete a transaction without any type of leverage, the majority of our transactions involve some type of bank financing. In larger transactions involving strategic acquisitions and Private Equity Groups, the acquiring entity usually has financing relationships in place. However, for transactions under $5,000,000 involving individual acquirers or smaller companies, we usually see financing involving an SBA guaranteed loan of one form or another. The SBA guarantee not only provides down side risk to the lender, it enables the borrower to get into a transaction with a lower down payment and a longer amortization period to pay

The end of the calendar is typically one of the busiest periods in the M&A industry. There are usually tax and other considerations, in completing a transaction at year end or the beginning of the new year. This year is no exception and, in fact, we are busier than usual as 2015 has just surpassed 2007 as the most active year for M&A activity, and we anticipate that this trend will carry over into 2016. Last month, I attended an industry conference which was attended by several dozen Private Equity Groups looking for acquisitions and, based on my conversations with

January is customarily the month noted for people making resolutions. If you are a business owner and contemplating the sale of your business within the next three years, let me suggest a few resolutions that might assist you with making your business more valuable and attractive to the marketplace. 1.  Start running your business like a business; not your personal checkbook. No one likes to pay taxes, but profits are important to buyers and lenders to prove that the business will be able to pay back debt and generate an appropriate income to sustain the buyer. The more income that you

When we are dealing with a business owner that owns the real estate that the business occupies, we are often asked about the best way to treat this underlying real estate. Unless there is a particular circumstance that clearly dictates the decision, our response is almost always to be flexible and be prepared to keep or sell the real estate to maximize the marketability of the business. In most situations, it is more difficult to sell the business than the real estate and the business owner has some options to achieve the desired outcome. For combined transactions of $5,000,000 or

I am currently involved with one of our associates in negotiating the sale of one our client’s companies. It is a desirable, growing business that attracted five offers from a diverse group of acquirers. Three of them are strategic industry buyers, one is a strategic buyer from a complementary industry, and one high net worth individual. Like many lower middle market transactions, the transaction was structured as an asset acquisition, rather than a stock sale. To facilitate a presentation to our client, my team prepared a spread sheet, comparing the proposals on an “apples to apples” basis. On their face, most of the

There are two primary ways to structure the sale of a business; an asset sale or a stock sale. Although, many potential business buyers and sellers do not have a good understanding of the differences between a stock and an asset sale, the format of the structure can have significant tax and liability ramifications. In a stock sale, the buyer buys all or a portion of the outstanding stock of the target business. As a result of the transaction, the buyer receives all of assets, including cash, of the selling company. The buyer also gets all of the liabilities, known and

As is typical at this time of year, we are seeing a significant amount of transaction activity.  Not only are we receiving year-end financial data from existing clients, but potential clients are providing information relative to valuation in anticipation of going to market.  Because valuations are front and center covering a significant portion of the surface area of my desk, I thought that an appropriate topic for this month’s article should at least be somewhat tangential to valuations. Although we value every business that we represent, we may have a conversation with our sell side clients about the advisability of going to market