$2B Company Founder on Youth, Inexperience, and Why You’re More Ready Than You Think

Among your stable of advisors as a Searcher and CEO, your legal team has to be among the most important. Your relationship with your legal advisor will span at least a decade, and will touch on every single aspect of the journey. For these reasons, who you partner with isn’t something to take lightly. Building upon on a foundation that was created over 160 years ago, Kilpatrick has more than 650 attorneys across 22 offices worldwide, with clients ranging from startups and search funds to more than one-third of the Fortune 50. Led by Brian Alexrad, Kilpatrick has a dedicated search fund team that works with searchers across the entire life cycle of the journey from inception through acquisition to exit. When you work with a Kilpatrick search fund attorney, you’ll have the confidence of working with someone who has seen it and done it many times before.

This episode is brought to you by Boulay⁠⁠⁠⁠, the industry standard for Quality of Earnings reports, tax, and small business audit services. Over the past 20 years, Boulay has worked directly with hundreds of search funds from capital raise to exit, currently assisting over 150 funds in the search phase, another 125 in the operating phase. They work with Searchers across the entirety of the ETA journey: They perform financial due diligence and create QofE reports that your investors can rely on, they provide a full suite of tax services both for your search fund and for the acquired company, they perform the annual audits required by most debt and equity investors, and also perform outsourced accounting services, acting as a fractional bookkeeper and controller for those companies whose needs might not necessitate full-time in-house resources.

This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Oberle Risk Strategies⁠⁠⁠⁠, the leading insurance brokerage and insurance diligence provider for the search fund community. The company is led by ⁠⁠August Felker⁠⁠ (himself a 2-time successful searcher), and has been trusted by search investors, lenders, searchers and CEOs for over a decade now. Their due diligence offering (which is 100% free of charge) will assess the pros and cons of your target company’s insurance program, including any potential coverage gaps, the pro-forma insurance pricing, and the program structure changes needed for closing. At or shortly after closing, they then execute on all of those findings on your behalf. Oberle has serviced over 900 customers across a decade of operation, including countless searchers and CEOs within the ETA community.