Successful Acquisitions

CHAPTER 6

THE PROSPECT FUNNEL

We are ready to begin the second stage of the Roadmap process for acquisition: Build the Relationships. Now that you’ve mapped out your overall strategy and identified your target markets, you can go in search of individual acquisition prospects. A word of warning here: You are shifting from the relative comfort of abstract strategy to dealing with real companies and real people. At this point, I have noticed that acquisition teams tend to become much more emotionally involved—sometimes to the detriment of the process. The solution as always is a strong system, because only a system enables you to take the emotion out of your decision making. To be clear, I am not saying that the pursuit of prospects should be undertaken ...