What % of costs from buying a business come down to the transaction costs? (Due diligence, advisors, legal, brokers, etc.)

@ConnorAbene I spend $5-15k in lawyer fees to buy single franchise location for $200k or 7 locations for $2M Rest of “due diligence” is done internally. Pretty easy with franchises Rarely are brokers involved since “off-market” direct from zee to zee

@ConnorAbene I've seen brokers anywhere from 1-10%. Legal usually 1-3%. QOE/accounting usually sub-1% . So 5-15%. lol

@ConnorAbene @ClintFiore @SMB_Attorney any thoughts?

@ConnorAbene % varies too much based on EV but $75-125k has been the costs from my experience between legals, DD, banking, QOE and advisors. For reference doing deals between 500k-5m EBITDA

@ConnorAbene Did a quick dive into my data. Looks like 6%-8% depending on deal size for “other costs.” Also 8-10% for broker. Larger transactions are Lehman scale or variant.

@ConnorAbene Huge variance based on value of deal (distress, reg multiple etc). I just spent 7% on legal, DD, travel for a distress dtc. Totally worth it.

@ConnorAbene Budget 20-25%. Shit ain’t free. Bonus pleasure for useless advisors.

@ConnorAbene In general, the % scales inversely with the size of the deal. 3-4% seems to be a reasonable assumption for LMM sized deals