of Selling Others' Businesses
By Anna Sowa / The Bulletin / March 16, 2007
When Moira Rounds first decided to sell her Bend business Area Rug Connection, she found herself working with five or six different people - from attorneys to certified public accountants to brokers - trying to secure a sale. The process was long and expensive, and Rounds wished she could somehow combine all those aspects of selling a business into one entity.
She eventually turned to Greg Byrne, a business broker and consultant who has experience in business transfers and acquisitions.
Less than one year after Byrne took on Rounds' business, she sold it.
"Selling a business is extremely specific - not just any old agent could come along and sell your business for you," said Rounds, who owned Area Rug Connection for 10 years. She had worked with multiple other commercial brokers before Byrne.
"It saves a lot of time and money and stress" to have one person organize the business sale, Rounds said. "Was there still a negotiation that my attorney handled? Yes, but that's standard protocol.
" Last month, Byrne began a new business in Bend, Rimrock Partners LLC, that he hopes will essentially be a one-stop shopping service for business owners looking for some type of exit strategy.
He and his partner, former Silicon Valley CEO Bruce Juhola, are banking on the belief that other business owners like Rounds exist - owners who know they want to sell their business but either don't know quite how or want one entity to do most of the dirty work for them. Many of those owners are baby boomers closing in on retirement, he says.
Their office is in downtown Bend's St. Clair Place. The business has two main purposes:
* Assisting exit planning so owners can exit and retire when they want to, while achieving the maximum value for the company and assisting in an owner's transition of the company to another owner, for example, a family member involved in the business.
* Helping an owner sell the company to a third party, for which Rimrock Partners would be the intermediary.
The company also will help businesses find the financing they need to grow or get started but will focus on exit strategies, Juhola said, adding that no other business in Central Oregon offers the same services.
Rimrock Partners hasn't signed deals with any clients yet, Juhola said, but they have started working with some.
Before moving to Bend in 2000, Byrne had worked as a chief financial officer for a small company in New York City, and started focusing on transaction work in the High Desert in 2001.
Juhola, who also is the local chairman of Vistage International - a worldwide CEO membership organization - expects the business to be popular with Central Oregon CEOs. Many of them are nearing retirement but haven't planned how to exit their company, he said.
Vistage sensed that many CEOs were nearing retirement and surveyed members on their plans, Juhola said. The survey found that 50 percent of Vistage's almost 8,000 U.S. members were planning on transferring the ownership of their business in the next five years - and most had no plans of how they could do it. "
They were spending more time planning their vacation than how to transition ownership of their companies," Juhola joked. "I thought, this sounds like an opportunity for a business focused on helping business owners on exit planning, or serving as an intermediary as they sell to a third party."
Rounds, 44, doesn't consider herself a baby boomer, but she thinks services offered by Rimrock Partners would benefit other business owners needing help with the major decision of selling a business.
Woody Carrick, who bought Area Rug Connection, agrees.
"I'm not an attorney by training, I'm not an accountant by training," Carrick said.
Byrne had consulted him on other businesses he was thinking of buying, which didn't pan out.
Chris Malpass, who owned the Bon Bien restaurant in Bend with her husband until the couple sold it in October, said selling the business was an exhausting process involving six different parties - buyers, sellers, the lender, the building owner, the building property manager and the real estate agent.
"It is very complicated and everybody is involved and you have to work a deal out that pleases everyone," she said.
It's hard for Malpass to imagine a business that consolidates that process. "I don't know what it could cut out of the process," she said.
