Ken Marlin

You know, so far it's starting out with a bang.

We actually closed a transaction today.

We have eight more that we're working on, which is a fair amount for us.

So, so far the year's starting out strong and we're just going to hope nobody does anything stupid to mess it up.

Oh, we don't do things for crass money.

We just do it for the honor and privilege of working with our clients.

They're great clients.

But every once in a while, they do pay us.

We do try hard to be the trusted advisor to people who want to buy or sell middle market technology companies.

We have both buyers and sellers who...

pay us a retainer to help them figure out what's the right thing to do.

And sometimes, interestingly, the right thing to do is to put your head down and keep growing your business for another year or two.

But sometimes the right thing to do is to transact.

And when it is, we try to help them do that in a smart way.

And we get a small piece of the purchase or the sale price.

You know, the bigger the deal, the smaller the percentage.

So when you're talking about deals that are a couple hundred million dollars, you're at under 1%.

And when you're talking about smaller transactions, then it could be as much as 7%.

For us, I'd say we probably average around 3% to 4%.

Yeah, I don't really measure transaction volume, you know, for for us in 2016.