Articles Posted in Mergers & Acquisitions

One of my clients is a medium sized manufacturing plant here in San Jose. Although not a high-tech business, they have extensive capital assets and specialized skills. The business is being run by the second generation of family members, and the third generation is now being trained to take the reins someday. The family has recognized that many of their competitors are still being run by the first generation of owners, and it does not look like those businesses are likely to transition to other family members. As the owners of the competitive businesses age and want to retire, they will be looking to sell their manufacturing plants. My client wants to buy them. We recently sat down and discussed acquisition strategies. I explained that there are two common ways to buy a business – either you buy the stock, or you buy the assets. What most people do not realize, is that even when you are only buying the assets, you could be liable for up to three times the purchase price in state taxes that should have been paid by the seller.

Most people know that when you buy the stock of a corporation (or membership interests in an LLC), you get all of the assets as well as all of the liabilities in that company. As a result, many of my clients want to buy only the assets of a company as a strategy to avoid the liabilities (known and unknown) that come with a business with history behind it. To accomplish this, we draft an asset purchase agreement that includes lists of which assets we are buying, which liabilities we are buying, and which liabilities we are not taking on. For example, when you buy the stock of a company, you get all of its employees including their accrued and unpaid vacation time. When you buy the assets of a company, we ask the selling business to terminate all of its employees so that we can start over by hiring them in the acquiring company as new employees, without any potential claims for what came before. However, many people do not realize that certain tax liabilities may follow the business of the company rather than the company itself. So, if you buy enough of the assets to be considered as having purchased the company, you could be buying tax liabilities… even if they are on your list of items excluded from the sale.

Each of the Franchise Tax Board (state franchise and income taxes), the Board of Equalization (sales taxes) and the Employer Development Department (employment taxes) has the right to come after the buyer of a business for unpaid taxes in an amount up to the entire purchase price. So, if you pay $100,000 for the assets of a company, you could be liable for unpaid taxes of up to $100,000 to each of those three government entities. Your $100,000 purchase price just became $400,000!

As a veteran M & A lawyer in San Jose, where deal making has never gone out of style, I have been though my share of mergers and acquisitions. For business counsel, the closing of a deal is one of the times I get to spike the ball in the end zone as I watch the cash flow to a happy (and relieved) seller. Needing only to put together a closing package, my work is done and I am off to popping the corks at the closing dinner. Or is it?

From sole proprietors and small businesses to large corporations, many business owners enter the sale process believing the closing of a deal is accompanied by a one-way ticket to paradise. They often find out, however, that the fun is just beginning. The first year after closing presents a number of challenges, all of which must be carefully managed to make sure the seller gets the full value of the business.

As I have discussed in prior blogs there are a number of adjustments, associated with audits and working capital, which occur within the first three to six months after closing, including the following:

Having represented both buyers and sellers in mergers and acquisition transactions in Silicon Valley for more years than I care to admit, I have been through a number of closings. Some M&A closings that I have been involved in were smooth affairs, accomplished through an exchange of a single phone call with a confirming email, while others have stretched into all night marathons. Although it is often difficult to know whether your deal will allow you to finish at a reasonable time, there are a number of actions you can take to make sure your closing is as smooth and stress free as possible.

Obtain Third Party Consents:

The most important task for both the seller and acquirer is to plan ahead. Everything you will need, to accomplish the closing, will take longer than you think. One item which often delays a closing is getting the necessary consents to the transaction required from third parties. Certain third parties, often parties to major relationships that the acquired company, post-closing, requires for its operations, have rights under their contracts to consent to any change in control. Many of these contracts create significant value for the acquired company and their continued existence are often a key incentive for the buyer proceeding with the deal. It is best to identify these material agreements early on and plan a strategy for securing the necessary consents. Other areas where third party consents might be required are when a party, often a strategic investor, has a right of first refusal that is triggered by the transaction.

Whether an acquisition is in San Jose, Cupertino, San Francisco, or anywhere else in California or the United States, any corporate lawyer will tell you that a buyer will not close a deal unless certain conditions are satisfied. Fortunately, closing conditions contained in mergers and acquisitions documentation have become standardized. Exceptions, however, always arise based on the unique attributes of the transaction, and standard does not always mean simple.

Some merger or acquisition closing conditions are standard and rarely require negotiation. For example, one of the standard closing conditions is that there is no injunction, law, or court order that prevents the transaction from proceeding. Outside of an actual known threat to a transaction, these clauses are rarely negotiated in a private company acquisition transaction.

Another standard closing condition is that the requisite corporate approvals will be secured. Because the respective Board of Directors of the each company will have approved the acquisition agreement, this is usually a noncontroversial item.

Although most of my career as a merger and acquisition and corporate lawyer has been spent in San Jose, issues involving earnouts do not have geographic boundaries. While many companies are acquired for their team or their technology, other companies are acquired because they make money for their stockholders. Earnouts provide an opportunity for a buyer to be assured that the company it has just bought will meet its objectives for the deal.

To construct an earnout that measures a company’s success in making money, a tension arises between allowing the selling company to operate on its own, thereby mimicking its performance as it existed before it was sold, and integrating the seller’s operations with the buyer. Buyers will want to integrate the seller as quickly as possible, but doing so will prevent the parties from determining how well the seller itself is performing.

The most important issue to determine is how profits will be calculated. As discussed in a previous blog, issues involving the use of GAAP become much more important as more revenue and expense items are measured. A detailed approach to calculating profits will help reduce disputes and provide guidance for the seller’s managers to use in maximizing the earnout.

Earnouts constructed to measure profits typically require the seller to operate as a separate division, or even a separate entity. To take advantage of synergies, some operations are centralized with the buyer, such as finance and administration. The first area of dispute involves the manner in which administrative overhead, and the type of overhead, will be charged against the earnout. Outside of textbook ratios, there is no magic number and the result is usually reached through negotiation.

Often sales forces are consolidated, and the allocation of sales-related expenses and commissions can be very difficult, especially when the buyer’s existing sales department is leveraged to produce sales for the seller. As with overhead, there are no easy answers and the approaches ultimately used are reached through negotiation.

Because of their complexity, earnout amounts are often disputed. Because of this, care must be taken to create an appropriate dispute resolution mechanism. Regardless of the dispute resolution process used for the acquisition agreement as a whole, arbitrating any earnout disputes has a number of advantages. First, the arbiter, or arbiters, can be specified as having expertise in accounting issues, or even in calculating earnouts. Relevant industry experience can be listed as a necessary attribute. Second, the arbitration can focus solely on determining the arbitration amount. Third, the parties can be required to go through nonbinding mediation. If successful, mediation can avoid the expense of an arbitration proceeding. Fourth, the proceedings can be kept confidential.

Earnouts, especially those based on profits, can be very complex and prone to dispute. Because of this, care must be taken by all parties to create a mechanism that will adequately measure performance while minimizing the opportunity for controversy.

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