Brad Jacobs

And it's just people have a very bad reaction to that and they can just lose it.

And I've noticed that.

I've noticed those two examples in many people.

But I'm going to add a third to that as I write in the book.

Thank you for reading it.

which is when people sell a business.

When people sell a business, particularly if they've spent decades building it up and they have family in the business and they're prominent in their community and their identity is associated with that business, they get really nervous and they get very anxious and they're very stressed out.

And it's extremely important when you're buying a company to be

very understanding and very respectful and very empathetic towards the seller.

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.