In M&A advisory, it is hard to form partnerships in success with sellers of businesses, when you coerce them into signing mandates and accepting terms without first building a trusting relationship and reaching conceptual agreement on their desired outcomes and the improvement in their condition.

Just as founders and entrepreneurs need a “blueprint” for selling their business, so do those seeking to advise them.

If you insist on pulling out the exact same club on every tee, without looking at the layout of the hole in front of you and the other factors that might impact on where the ball lands, little wonder that more often than not your ball finds immediate “trouble”.

Is that the type of expertise you’d hire if the roles were reversed?