If you work inside a business as a Finance Director, Financial Controller, CFO, or senior finance professional the day your company is sold will be one of the most consequential financial events you will ever be involved in. Yet most finance teams are caught unprepared when it happens. The reality is that the decisions made long before a buyer appears how the numbers are presented, how the business is structured, how operations are documented, how contracts and liabilities are managed - will shape the outcome more than any last-minute effort ever can.
Ireland is currently seeing a significant wave of founder retirements, private equity interest, and international acquisition activity across the SME sector. For finance professionals working inside those businesses, understanding the mechanics of a sale what buyers look for, where value gets created or destroyed, and what your specific role is in the process is no longer optional. This session gives you the inside track: a practical, jargon free framework drawn from real transactions, so that when the time comes, you are the person in the room who is ready.
Tom Murray will cover the following topics during this presentation:
- How buyers actually value your business and why your instinct on value is probably wrong
- Your most important job before a sale: making the numbers tell a clear, trusted story
- Operational and commercial readiness - what scalability looks like to a buyer
- A practical walkthrough of the issues that derail deals or reduce price at the eleventh hour: lease and contract expiries, unresolved legal or HR matters, unclear IP ownership, GDPR gaps, licensing issues, and company structure inefficiencies.
- The finance team's checklist for sale readiness housekeeping and why starting 18 months out is not too early.
- Tax structuring to maximise net proceeds.
- Navigating the transaction buyer types, deal structures, and protecting your position
- Trade buyers vs private equity vs family offices: what each values, how they behave in diligence, and what they mean for the finance team post-sale.
- Understanding earn-outs, deferred consideration, and management retention incentives.
- The finance director's role during the transaction itself — supporting the data room, responding to queries, and keeping the business running while a deal is live.
By attending this webinar, you will:
- Understand how acquirers assess and value a business, including how EBITDA is normalised, what multiples mean, and what due diligence actually cover.
- Take practical steps to strengthen financial reporting, forecasting, and KPI rigour in ways that directly improve valuation readiness - starting immediately
- Identify and proactively resolve the operational, contractual, and structural issues most likely to cause problems during a sale process
- Understand what different buyer types, trade, PE, family office, mean for the business, the deal structure, and the finance team's role post-transaction
- Play a confident, informed role in a live sale process: supporting the data room, managing diligence queries, and protecting the interests of the business and its shareholders throughout
Course Level: Intermediate
