Any tricks of the trade when dealing with the original owner while going through the bid/purchase process? Not sure why he's trying to do this all himself other than to save on costs, but he's been bogged down and busy. Kind of annoying not getting info needed from him timely.
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Some of the best deals I've seen were working directly with the seller, the key reason for that is that normally the seller is not talking to a lot of people so you can negotiate better deals because of less competition. Having said that, they normally take a longer time and are much more of a roller coaster/lower odds, this is because even when the seller engages with you, a lot of times he has not made the decision to sell, he is normally not well organized (has his documents in order) and the sale is not normally their focus, they are normally looking at it opportunistically. You may do all the work of convincing him to sell and then he goes out and hires a broker to run a competitive process (very common in larger companies). So better deals, but harder and longer to get done with more hiccups along the way.
The broker does have a role to play as was mentioned in helping prepare, knowing what the best practices are and sharing the education of the seller with you. Just the fact that he hired a broker means the seller took the conscious decision to pay someone to sell his company for him, even if just a success fee, that already increases the likelihood that a sale will happen.
The one piece of advice I would give would be broker or no broker establish a relationship with the seller, understand him and his motivations. You probably want a good relationship with him if you end up buying his company, you may even want him to stick around and ultimately you are taking over his proud & joy and a key piece of his life, so having those ties established can make all the difference in the world. Let's not forget, he was the one building or running the company so if you don't get along with him and don't see eye to eye on quite a few things, you may have a lot of cultural issues going into the company you bay off him, and it can quickly go from an acquisition to a turnaround.
The above is of course a generalization, each seller is a unique case and will have his own way of looking at the world.
Hope this helps.