Any views on extending the search phase due to COVID-19 crisis?

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Reply by a searcher
from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, MA, USA

Hi Alex, not pretending to be an expert here but in my view that depends a lot on your specific context and mood. Are you at the end of your search or still in the middle of it but feel it has slowed you down and thus want to add a few months at the end? Which industries are you looking into and how hard are they hit by COVID? What are you hearing from owners you're talking to about how COVID is affecting their willingness to sell? Are you still enjoying searching and feel like you want to keep going or are you just over it by now? ;-)
I'm sure there's plenty more to consider.

If I were in your shoes I would probably take those factors and try to figure out whether COVID has made it more or less likely for you to find a deal of your liking in the next few months (assuming you're thinking about wrapping up your search soon) and weigh the opportunity cost of continuing your search against that.
Just going to put my general hypothesis on likelihood of finding a good deal in the next months out there and please feel free to challenge:
- Owners of hardest hit companies will become more willing to sell but you essentially have a turnaround case on your hands which is everything but an ideal for you as an operator
- Owners of less impacted companies won't significantly change their minds about willingness to sell
- Valuations in the EBITDA range interesting to search funds won't take a significant hit since they haven't gone through the same inflation as typical PE targets in recent history
- Overall, I wouldn't expect your odds of finding a great acquisition target to increase by a lot - for me it comes down to your gut feeling and if you have the energy to keep going!

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