M&A Fundamentals For VARs

By Abby Sorensen, Editor

Advice on selling your business can improve your company now.

Every VAR should want to increase recurring revenue, form stickier relationships with customers, maintain organized financial records, and accelerate growth. If you listened to sound bites of Brooke Ybarra’s (pronounced ee-bar-a) keynote presentation at Channel Executive’s Retail IT VAR Of The Future conference in April, you might have thought she was giving advice on how to run a successful IT channel company. Instead, the senior manager at First Annapolis Consulting (recently acquired by Accenture) was giving VAR executives insights on how to prepare their businesses for a sale. Much of Ybarra’s advice is similar to the buying and selling process she sees regularly in the enterprise payment space. No, solutions providers are likely not going to be involved in a $10.4 billion deal any time soon (that’s what Vantiv paid to acquire Worldpay in August 2017, not to mention the $1.65 billion it paid for Mercury in 2014). Still, Ybarra knows the channel, and her insights into M&A fundamentals apply to businesses of all sizes.