Interesting talk on Search Funds at the M&A Source Meeting in New Orleans - May 2018

Earlier in this month, Live Oak Bank gave an interesting talk about Searchers looking for funding - the title of the talk was Getting Search Funds Deals Done, and was geared towards M&A Intermediaries that come across Search Funds looking for the businesses. It also referred to some of the research and statistics of this site - SearchFunder.com, citing a growth of search funds at the rate of about 40% per year and 428% over last five years.

For the benefit of the intermediaries, it described the three categories of search funds:

• - Traditional Funds (where the searcher receives a salary for up to 2 years and has investors
• - Self-funded (no salary for the searcher and bringing in equity investors and debt financing after structuring an agreement
• - Single-sponsor or fund-less sponsors (independent sponsors) - They raise equity from a single source
• 
  

The talk provided some case studies and it was very useful for the M&A intermediaries as it showed the potential of working with the search funds. Live Oak Bank has quite a bit of experience in financing searchers and it also maintains a database that has a list of searchers and the businesses that they are searching for and some of the requirements of these businesses.

If you are looking for funding, or even wanting to learn how they could potentially help you, maybe worthwhile contacting them,

The talk was given by Heather Endresen, Senior Loan Officer - redacted ; ###-###-####