Recorded webinar: James Jimenez from MNST Company.com presents “Exit Strategies for Startups” to entrepreneurs at the Lean Culture meetup.
Key Takeaways from Exit Strategies for Startups by James Jimenez of MNSTCompany
James Jimenez from MNST Company.com presented “Exit Strategies for Startups” to the Silicon Valley Lean Culture meetup.
James Jimenez is an accomplished finance partner with over 9 years of experience in operations and corporate finance. James will offer a briefing on things you can do right now that will increase your options for getting acquired later.
His expertise has been used to close $50M in acquisitions, manage $1B in revenue, and create $30M+ in cashflow. He’s partnered with top private equity firms like The Carlyle Group & Francisco Partners to strategically increase company valuations.
Key Takes Aways
Here are my key takeaways from this excellent webinar “Exit Strategies for Startup Founders and CEOs.”
James Jimenez advised that startups need to consider how they look from the “Eye of Buyer.” He offered an example of criteria of a healthcare company might use to screen candidates:
- A high quality product that improves the quality of information flow and engagement between payers, providers and/or consumers and could benefit from the scale of our platform and connections.
- A product that existing customers / owners would want to consume and which ideally can be easily paired with our existing products.
- A proven “best in class” (or near-best-in-class for highly competitive sub-markets) solution which is appropriate for scale deployment.
- Upon full implementation / integration makes us a more relevant and integral part of modern US healthcare ecosystem.
- Brings talent, subject matter expertise and technical competency. Has key employees with deep product knowledge and are experienced in product development.
He stresses the importance of the startups to be very specific in their value. The more specific you are in addressing your market and value creation, the easier it is to be on the radar of somebody in the corporate development space looking to acquire that type of business or make that type of investment.
He shares the characteristics of two major buckets of M&A: Micro (<$1.0M) Middle Market ($1.0M+). He shared typical valuations and provided a list where to be listed.
He presented a couple of common themes for positioning yourself for buyers:
- Cash cow (large market share)
- Bolt-on
- Lazy big brother
According to James, the average time it takes to grow your business and get an exit is 7-10 years.
Slides for “Exit Strategies for Startups Founders & CEOs”
Below are the slides from James Jimenez from MNST Company.com
Transcript – coming soon.
Additional Resources:
- Pete Tormey: Slicing the Pie – How to Keep Harmony Among Founders
- eMOBUS Acquisition: How Bootstrappers Close Deals – Moe Arnaiz, CEO of eMOBUS, and Mathieu Guilmineau, CTO, share lessons learned bootstrapping to an 8 figure exit.
- Due Diligence Checklist For Evaluating A Service Business for Acquisition
- Three Tips from Sid Faulkner For Preparing To Sell Your Startup
- How To Thrive After An Acquisition
- Founder’s Story: An EDA Acquisition During the DotCom Boom
- Founder Story: Acquisition Integration at 60 days
- Wine Management Systems Acquired by Process2Wine
- Tequity Helps Technology Startups Find Their Best Strategic Buyer