Brad Jacobs

It's not just a personal family business either, even a corporate one.

Even a corporate one, if the stakes are high, and they have advisors telling them to do this and do that, and it's usually not really good advice in terms of relationship building, which for me is the most important thing in M&A is

having a good relationship with the seller, with the other party.

So they definitely do things that they normally wouldn't do otherwise.

Like I said earlier, you need to know what you're buying.

And in order to do that, you have to gobble up as much information as possible from every possible source you can get it from, external and the company directly.

And that's really the main stuff I want to figure out when I'm doing a deal.

I want to understand what is this company really about?

Every company has got positive things about it, strong things about it, opportunities, wins, successes.

And every company also has negative parts.

That's normal.

There is no company that's all good or all bad, at least that I've come across.

So the due diligence process in M&A is to try to figure out both of those things.

What are the things that make it a strong investment case?

And what are the things that these are risks?

These are downsides.

This is hair on the deal.

Is this hair we can take off?

Is this a risk that we can live with?

What do we think the chances of this happening?