A few days ago Via Empresa interviewed Jordi Alberich at our offices to talk about the nearly forty years of M&A Fusiones y Adquisiciones and how the market for corporate transactions has changed since then.

We took away three ideas from the conversation:

  • Selling an SME is much more than a commercial transaction. For many business owners it means closing a chapter of their lives, and without empathy it is very hard for a transaction to reach a successful close.
  • AI will speed up the search for information, and that is a great help in the early phases. But in selling a company the nuances are decisive, and those are still provided by a person.
  • Whether a company is sold is not what matters. What matters is what is done afterward with the proceeds. For someone who is an entrepreneur by vocation, it is very hard to become a rentier, and it is good for everyone that they return to the circuit of risk.

Selling an SME has “little that is technical and a lot of empathy, of the kind that AI will not provide.”

Every case is different. Obviously, it is always a commercial matter, if only because the formalization is. However, when we talk about SMEs with a long-standing shareholder base, in which some of the shareholders have made the company their fundamental space, all of this carries a very important emotional connotation. It is present from the moment the business owner considers selling, or decides it is the best option, but it becomes especially acute at the moment of truth.

Even when the terms are excellent, in the end there is always a “I want to and I don’t want to.” It is more than a commercial transaction; it is about closing a chapter of life and, on many occasions, with the prospect that you will not start anything similar again. Even though, normally, business owners are better off than ever after selling the company. All this means there is a very important psychological side. Of course, legal and financial knowledge is needed, but without empathy, a sale of an SME is very unlikely to go through.

You can read the full interview in the ViaEmpresa article.