Hey, it's Paul. 🤓
After more than 20 years and over 3,000 transactions, those two truths are the closest thing I have to a law of physics in this business.
Everyone loves talking about getting the deal.
Finding buyers. Winning mandates. Generating deal flow. Closing the handshake.
But deals rarely die because nobody found a buyer.
They die because the process breaks.
A missing document. An unanswered diligence request. A compliance surprise. A spreadsheet nobody can find. An email chain with 37 replies and no owner. A task everyone assumed someone else was handling.
Then momentum disappears.
And when momentum disappears, risk shows up.
A buyer gets cold feet. A lender changes terms. A key employee leaves. Performance slips. The deal gets harder.
I've seen it happen more times than I can count.
The best transactions aren't always the biggest. They aren't always the most profitable.
They're usually the most prepared.
Clean financials. Organized records. Clear ownership. Defined processes.
Prepared sellers create options. Options create leverage.
That's the real lesson.
For years, our industry focused on deal flow. Marketplaces. Listings. Introductions. Lead generation.
All important, but very few people focused on the transaction itself.
The work between LOI and close. The coordination. The documentation. The compliance. The accountability. The infrastructure.
As millions of businesses transition ownership over the next decade, that gap only gets bigger.
More deals. More stakeholders. More complexity. More compliance.
The platforms of yesterday were built to generate introductions. The platforms of tomorrow will be built to execute transactions.
That's one of the reasons we built CandaceAI.
Not to help people find deals, but to help them close them.
Because ownership changes lives, but only if the deal gets done.
So here's my question for you: What's the biggest deal killer you've seen during diligence, or between LOI and close?
Hit reply and tell me your story. I read everyone.
Main Street is worth fighting for.
PK 🤓
P.S. Want to see what we're building? Visit CandaceAI.com.