Every day, we learn to appreciate the most valuable and finite part of our lives — time! As we are all quickly running out of it, let's invest a few minutes to explore how dealmaking can improve the time invested in our business and personal space.
Here are quick illustrations that contribute 5 to 10 plus years to the business and personal life cycles of business owners:
- Capturing arbitrage opportunities that last for a specific window of time. Whether it is to acquire key assets, market share, geographical footprint, or others. It is only a matter of time before markets divert and such opportunities are lost.
- Avoiding or reducing the negative impact of market threats that can set back what businesses have built or delay their growth for a few years
- Rising above competition as players race to consolidate or break market entry barriers and take advantage
- Growing 3-5 times in half the planned number of years
- Raising funds for growth or wealth for shareholders in one investment deal equivalent to 5–10 years of net profit from operations
- Allowing more quality time to be spent with people close to us. Despite growing wealth, many business owners have sought investment deals to free up more time to attend unique moments with special people
- Freeing up more personal space for hobbies, philanthropy, discovery, and other personal goals
- Enjoying a better personalized lifestyle
- Sharing the positive impact on the lifestyle and personal lives of other people from growing businesses, including employees, customers, and many others
To maximize the time benefits for our network, and realizing that time is limited for our business and personal lifecycles as well, we are continuously developing our Ace dealmaking model to optimize time spent for everyone on the dealmaking table. Here are a few takeaways we learned to optimize time across three areas: people to people relations, work ethics, and information flow.
- Cultivating long-term relations rather than short term relations. Longer term relations strengthen bonds that span over several years, and they only consume short correspondences lasting 1 minute to 15 minutes
- Warm and short introductions to welcome new members to the network, with short 15-minute 1 to 1 meetings to share interests. Many of these short introductions have grown into long-term relationships
- Wide geographical spread to remove barriers between cultures and locations. Within 24 hours, we can connect people within our network across any part of the world
- Boutique mode. Opposite to a large number of teams and layers, our Ace boutique fosters close and warm people to people interactions, enriching people's human relations and communication
- Consistency. Maintaining consistency makes it easier for us and our network to communicate and build partnerships as we continue to connect the dots
- Agility. Being light with information flow and communication, removing barriers that create confusion or extend deals unnecessarily, and being able to continuously evolve with market shifts
- Simplicity. We believe experienced professionals optimize time schedules by using simple and straightforward processes to avoid misunderstandings and confusion. We like simple documents and communication that reflect specific data points and smooth information flow
- Knowledge transfer. As we share more knowledge with our network and the growing Ace team, we encourage the circulation of knowledge that empowers our network and empowers us.
- Size of information. Progressive sharing of information that grows with deal progress, starting with key summarized data points and proceeding to cover a comprehensive data room
- Deal design. We formulate a quick deal design using our cumulative experience and interests of our investor network in the first encounter with a business owner. We like to save months for businesses using a trial and error approach to find investment options
- Deal gaps. We identify and remove deal gaps from the beginning to save time for both sides at the deal table
- Meeting logistics. We use brief calls followed by meetings or site visits at key stages of deal discussions to save hours of time from nonproductive meetings. This is especially useful for cross-border meetings that include travel logistics.
- Honest opinion. We like to share direct and honest advice over 10 minute calls with deals that are not investment-ready, giving direction to businesses. We don't like to pressure businesses to execute deals when they are not ready, and we don't like to leave them without direction. A few years later, some business owners implemented such advice and succeeded in dealmaking.
Connect with Amr or Ace to explore this topic in more depth and connect on your dealmaking journey. #peopletopeople
