Rory Wade and Gemma Blank were at the University of Sheffield Investment Conference earlier this month. Talking to students about mid-market M&A, or more specifically, about the parts that don’t make it into the textbooks.
The technical side of a deal is learnable. Process, valuation, documentation. These things can be taught, and they are. What’s harder to teach is an understanding of what’s actually driving the people in the room.
M&A gets presented as a rational discipline, but it’s not always the case. A founder selling a business they’ve spent twenty years building is navigating something that goes well beyond a transaction. There’s identity in it. There’s fear. Buyers come in with their own pressures, internal politics, risk appetite, the need to look good to people above them. Everyone has a version of what a good outcome looks like, and those versions rarely match at the start. The gap between where a deal should land on paper and where it actually lands is almost always a people problem, rarely a numbers problem.
This is something the Sentio team think about a lot. Probably more than most.
The other thing Rory and Gemma talked about — and this comes up every time they do these sessions — is curiosity, not technical brilliance. The advisers who do well over a long career tend to be the ones who are genuinely interested in people. What’s motivating them, what they’re not saying and what they actually need. You can learn valuation from a textbook. Reading a room is a different skill entirely.
It’s always good to spend time with the next generation coming into the industry and we look forward to the next USIS event.
