Three options for selling your brokerage

A consistent stream of property and casualty brokerage acquisition announcements over the past few years likely has a lot of brokerage owners thinking about how they’ll eventually exit the business.

For most sales transactions, there are three basic options.

One common handover is for a brokerage owner to sell out to family and long-time staff members. These sales are usually a two-stage process.

“It’s not incredibly complex. It surrounds valuation and then financing,” Herb Cline, president of CF2K Strategic Consultants told a session at the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario’s recent convention. “What I have found in the past is that, in family transitions, the valuations are quite generous because they really want to hand it off to the next generation.”

One a price is agreed on, buyers will need to obtain financing. And in some cases, owners will finance the sales themselves — particularly if the buyers are family members, said business valuation experts Canadian Underwriter spoke with.

A second option is to sell either to an individual bulk broker or large regional player.

“Many of you have good relationships with brokers in neighboring towns, or maybe on the other side of the city,” Cline said. Principals at these firms often approach one another and suggest granting a right of first refusal should one of them decide to sell.

“You’ve kind of said to each other…let’s make sure that we keep the independence because you have similar philosophies, similar cultures related to how you train and promote staff [and] how you deal with your customers,” said Cline, who advises insurance brokers and MGA owners on transactions and valuations.

 

Related:  Register here for “How to become a young brokerage owner” on November 22, 1 P.M. Eastern Time, via LinkedIn Live.

 

And then there’s the third option — a sale to a very large national or international broker. These consolidators generally have aggressive mandates to grow through acquisition and are rarely concerned about financing. In some cases, they even have private equity cash in play for these purchases.

Regardless of which option you choose, your key partners will be:

• Your lawyer. They know your legal structure and all your company’s historical transactions. That means they’ll likely be involved in any pending or outstanding litigation. “They can really help guide the process from a legal perspective,” said Cline.
• Your accountant. They’re the certified advocate of your financial statements and understand your income-distribution strategies. “If you have multiple companies [or] a strategy that includes dividends and includes distributions…they’ll be able to guide you going forward,” he said.
• An M&A advisor. “They know the bidders. They know their personalities…who they’re financed by, and they can bring them into the process,” said Cline. “[Plus] they can run the competitive process for you, so you don’t have to worry about engaging with all these people. You just have to…evaluate what is coming to you by way of offers.”

Prior to starting the sale process, an owner needs to prepare a confidential information memorandum (CIM). The document serves as a roadshow tool that tells potential buyers about you, your company and staff — everything from the products you sell and industries in which you specialize, to your historical financial statements and forward performance projections.

“There [are] ways to structure and tweak that document to ensure that there’s a maximum attractional value and maximum of compensation value,” Cline said.

He noted preparing a CIM generally takes four-to-six weeks, after which the process moves to contacts with bidders, assessment of offers and ultimately a decision about which offer to accept.

 

Feature photo courtesy of iStock.com/LUHUANFENG