Richard S. Ruback

Welcome to Think Big, Buy Small, a podcast from Harvard Business School about entrepreneurship through acquisition.

We're your hosts, Royce Yudkoff and Rick Rubeck.

Today, Rick and I are going to focus on a very important element of buying your own company, which is how to negotiate the letter of intent and the purchase agreement and the other related legal documents that get your deal done.

As our guest, we're hosting Jared Shwartz.

Jared is a deeply experienced mergers and acquisitions attorney with a focus on smaller firms, so he brings a wealth of experience to our conversation.

What counterparties are you going to be dealing with as advisors, right? Because a lot of times the relationship between the advisors can really dictate whether the deal is going to go smoothly or whether there might be bumps in the road.

So again, because I've lived in that world, we're able to put ourselves in the shoes of the advisors that we're dealing with on the other side.

That's a really great example because Rick and I frequently observe that because the sellers are almost always first-time sellers, one of the issues that often comes up is they pick as their advisor someone they trust but who may not have any background.

We're your hosts, Royce Yudkoff

And Rick Ruback.

Royce and I are delighted to welcome Aaron Wyatt to our podcast today.

Aaron is different from a lot of our podcast participants because Aaron is a kind of self-made entrepreneur that didn't follow the classic ETA route.

Oh, yeah.

And he's, he's not gonna punt that off to somebody else.

Rick has a name he's called this, which I've adopted too 'cause I think it's so good, which is CEO superpowers.

'Cause the customer is gonna respond differently when the CEO owner shows up than when an equally well-trained salesperson shows up.