David Bonderman, leading global investor and founder of the Texas Pacific Group
"After reading Rickertsen's insider view on leveraged deals, no one in America will want to work for wages again."


Dr. Terrance Lapier, Entrepreneurship Faculty, The Wharton School
"Likely toecome the essential manual for management buyouts."


Bill Marriott, Chairman, Marriott International, Inc.
"Rickertsen has written a must-read for every manager with the dream of buying and running his own company."


Book Description
Successful management buyouts (MBOs) are the pinnacle of business success today and a great way to earn an ever-increasing stake in the American dream. Buyout provides managers and executives with the necessary tools and strategies for leading a company or division buyout. It explores the details of the entire buyout process and empowers managers to seize their destiny and take charge. Managers learn how to: * Find a company to purchase * Develop a business plan * Negotiate with the seller * Win the "ground war" of due diligence * Find equity partners and negotiate the management deal with investors * Run the company after the MBO. Buyout offers real-life stories of people who actually pulled off out-of-this-world deals and became rich beyond their wildest expectations.


Book Info
A text for managers ready to run a company of their own. Presents the practical tools needed to identify a strong prospect for acquisition, effectively analyze the situation, negotiate and structure the terms of purchase, perform due diligence, close the deal, and exit. A text for those ready to buy out their own or another company. DLC: Management buyouts.


About the Author
Rick Rickertsen (Washington, D.C.) is the COO of Thayer Capital Partners. He has lead more than 50 buyouts, including the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and SAGA Software.


Excerpted from Buyout : The Insider's Guide to Buying Your Own Company by Rick Rickertsen, Robert E. Gunther. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
-Foreword It's a pleasure to introduce this richly informative and admirable book, which offers not merely a glimpse but a clear, wide-open view of the high peaks of finance. Buyout is really two books in one. The first part is an instruction manual for well-to-do people who have decided they would like to become really, really rich. The author, Rick Rickertsen, wouldn't put it quite that way, I'm sure. Like many of the most successful people in business, he believes that business professionals are more likely to get rich if they don't spend all their time thinking about getting rich. If asked, he would probably say that he's written an instruction manual for corporate executives who have grown tired of the upper tiers of wage slavery and have summoned the nerve to seize control of their companies and their destinies. The money is merely symptomatic, a pleasant side effect, of that admirable willingness to take risk. And perhaps he's right. Still, as everyone who has watched the Internet boom knows, the best way to get rich is to have equity in a successful company, and this book helps them to do it. Happily, as the author points out, history is currently conspiring with all potential readers. Many industries are following the example of the Internet boom and finding ways to give equity to their employees, or risk losing them to Internet companies. As Rickertsen puts it, "All companies will have to become Internet companies if they want to compete for talented managers." And, of course, the best way for a manager to get a big piece of equity is to buy the company from the current absentee owners. The trouble is, How exactly do you buy out a company? Although low finance has been denuded of much of its mystique and complexity, high finance remains opaque. What, pray tell, is an 83(b) election? How do you write a confidentiality agreement? Why does anyone work for a commercial bank, anyway? Only insiders know how this stuff works. Enter Buyout, and its author, who, as a leading buyout expert, is himself an insider. In clear, simple language he brings the complexity of high finance to its knees and leaves it begging for mercy. He explains its inner workings so that even a journalist can understand them. In the process, it would seem, he undermines his own interests. After all, one of the advantages long enjoyed by capitalists in their dealings with entrepreneurs is that the entrepreneurs don't fully understand what capitalists do or how they think. This book corrects that deficit. It teaches people who seek capital how best to deal with the people who control the capital. This raises an obvious question: Why would a buyout expert write a book to help ordinary corporate numbnuts get the best possible deal from buyout experts? At first glance the book appears an act of self-destruction; it's as if the U.S. government sent a crack team of American physicists to China to help the Chinese fine-tune their long-range nuclear missiles. There are, I think, several reasons. I know the author well, and so I also know that he is at least partly motivated by warm feelings for people who take risk in life. He is one of those rare people who actually feels good when others do well for themselves, especially if they have stuck their neck out in the process. Put another way: He likes to see people stick their necks out so that he can feel good for them when they are rewarded for it. Altruism, however, is never a satisfactory explanation for the behavior of a successful businessperson, even one as nice as Rick Rickertsen. My guess is that he has a narrower motive, too. The business world is changing. Increasingly, it favors people who actually do things at the expense of those who lend them the money to do it with. Sooner or later, the author may have figured, someone was going to explain everything to the guy across the bargaining table, and so it may as well be him, lest he appear to be just another greedy capitalist. Yet there is still a third motive at work here, and it is perhaps the most powerful: the simple desire to make sense of one's experience. Anyone who has lost millions of dollars of other people's money by sinking them in a company run by a man who wears pinkie rings and hangs stuffed marlins on his wall needs the loan of an ear. He has had a wonderfully traumatic experience; he needs an audience to share it with. As I said, Buyout is really two books in one, and it is. The second book is a vivid description of the world through the eyes of a capitalist. This worldview may prove more useful to capitalists than to those who seek to use them, but it will please both, and anyone else who likes a good story, well told. -Michael Lewis

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Successful management buyouts (MBOs) are the pinnacle of business success today and a great way to earn an ever-increasing stake in the American dream.

Buyout provides managers and executives with the necessary tools and strategies for leading a company or division buyout. It explores the details of the entire buyout process and empowers managers to seize their destiny and take charge. Managers learn how to:

Find a company to purchase Develop a business plan Negotiate with the seller Win the "ground war" of due diligence Find equity partners and negotiate the management deal with investors Run the company after the MBO. Buyout offers real-life stories of people who actually pulled off out-of-this-world deals and became rich beyond their wildest expectations.

SYNOPSIS

Buyout provides managers and executives with the necessary tools and strategies for leading a company or division buyout. It explores the details of the entire buyout process and empowers managers to seize their destiny and take charge. Managers learn how to:

Find a company to purchase Develop a business plan Negotiate with the seller Win the "ground war" of due diligence Find equity partners and negotiate the management deal with investors Run the company after the MBO.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

After reading Rickertsen's insider view on leveraged deals, no one in America will want to work for wages again." David Bonderman, leading global investor and founder of the Texas Pacific Group. "Only insiders know how this stuff works. Rickertsen is an insider. He brings the complexity of high finance to its knees, and leaves it begging for mercy. He explains its inner workings so that even a journalist can understand them. — (Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing)

Dr. Terrence Lapier, Entrepreneurship Faculty, The Wharton SchoolLikely to become the essential manual for management buyouts. This high-impact book will be required reading for every entrepreneurial-minded MBA, manager, seller of a company, and professional in the buyout and M&A businesses.  — Terrence Lapier