Takeover Artist

  

Categories: Entrepreneur

See: Takeover.

Someone who's really good at taking over companies. What makes them good? Well, there are really two elements here. The buying comes first. Can they find the right fragile company that's stumbling, thanks to bad management? Or is fighting upstream in an environment now heavy with tech, but where they're not equipped to fight? Maybe they have blocks of angry frustrated shareholders and insiders who, for a modest premium in stock price, would sell out enough blocks of stock so that the takeover artist now controls the company.

So the buying is a combo of gentle massage and axe-murdererness, with gentle threats and FUD-wringing all over the place. That's the first part. The second is the operations of the company, performed way better after it's been bought. Like...does the artist know how to deal with long form union contracts? Can they source from Mexico and China and save 500 basis points in costs? Can they refinance debt from the Germans on better terms? Can they technologify things and make the product hip and cool again, so that stores actually want to stock it without big checks upfront?

That's all part of the art, yes, The art of the deal, more or less.

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