You run IHeartCholesterol, a 100-store pizza chain. You have no debt and small cash amounts. You have used extra cash historically to buy or open additional pizza parlors.
But now along comes MetabolismKillers, a chain of 40 pizza parlors. They want 20 million bucks for you to buy all of them, and the parlors themselves currently produce each year about a million bucks in cash. You think that, with your buying leverage of cheese and dough and oven rentals, you could make the acquisition produce cash flow of a million-and-a-half bucks in Year One just by virtue of lowering expenses on volume purchases of the stuff you put on the pizzas.
Minor problem: You don't have 20 million bucks laying around. Your own existing business has cash flow of about $3 million a year. Combined, you'd have $4.5 million a year in cash flow, and that should be enough to quickly pay off the Acquisition Financing of $20 million you want to raise from your kindly loving bankers, who are all too happy to loan you the money at onerous terms.
If things go well, you grow great; if they don't, the financiers likely take ownership of your pizza chain and all your hard work is wizzed away, like the soda you drank three hours ago.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Debt-to-EBITDA?58 Views
finance a la shmoop what is the debt to EBITDA ratio alright people well
anytime you see that to in there a pretty good chance we're dealing with a [Person writes ratio on chalkboard]
ratio and yeah this one's a ratio that compares what a company owes in debt to
its EBITDA or earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization
otherwise lovingly known on Wall Street as cash flow like the cash it produces [Cash falls from sky]
alright well the numbers used by bankers and investors to see how leveraged is a
company is and evaluate its creditworthiness the higher the number
the more likely it is that a company will struggle to pay up its debt.. Well,
let's use a couple of practical examples here, a demo;
if your friend Deb wants
to borrow five grand from you maybe Deb just doesn't want her pops to
know she you know dented the car she's not the best driver in the world and
Deb's a two on the friend reliability scale like you totally trust her and [Deb moving side to side on reliability scale]
she's a lawyer and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year suing people
for stuff all right well after living expenses she has cash flow personally of
some fifty grand a year that she socks away in a mattress you know what she [Deb places cash under mattress]
sleeps on so you'd go ahead and make the loan to Deborah and you'd have no doubt
that she has the dough to pay you back your five grand the debt to EBITDA in
this situation five grand over 50 grand or one to ten or 0.1 very low debt to
EBITDA ratio there very safe bet she'll pay you back your five grand
well this logic applies to loaning companies money as well the five grand [Man discussing loans outside Amazon building]
in debt is quote money good unquote and you don't lose sleep over loaning them
that money if they have good credit and low debt to EBITDA doubt ratios right they
have more than enough cash flow to cover that debt well so then what's bad debt
to EBITDA ratio like what does that look like well it's when you have debt
of more than three or four five times cash flow some companies go even higher [Bad debt-to-EBITDA ratio example]
so if whatever dot-com has 50 million dollars in cash flow but three hundred
million dollars in debt that's a really high debt to EBITDA ratio of three
hundred over fifty or six to one or you just say
6x if that debt costs a 8% a year to rent well then the total cost just to pay
interest is 24 mil or almost half of all the company's cash flow for the entire
company and remember they got to be paying down the principal as they go [Whatever.com's cash flow debt]
along as well so it's a huge percentage of their cash flow just goes to the bank
should whatever com stumble and maybe you don't know interest rates go up as
well well then things could get ugly really fast and yes even uglier than [Deb driving a car in a storm]
this so yeah you want low debt to EBITDA ratios not high ones unless you're a
real dice roller there [Debt laid in hospital bed]
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