Thirty years on the capital side of the deal, now on your side of the table.

Joel Arberman

Joel Arberman, Founder

Most acquisition education comes from people who have bought businesses. Our founder, Joel Arberman, has spent thirty years on the capital side of those transactions. He began as a fixed income analyst at First Investors Asset Management and an equity analyst at SunAmerica Asset Management. At 22 he became a partner at Yorkton Securities, a 700-person investment bank, where he was one of the first analysts to cover the internet as a sector and was top-ranked in Brendan Wood International's survey of institutional investors. His work centered on valuation and on helping early-stage companies raise capital and go public.

Since then he has taken seventeen companies public, several of them his own: eleven by direct listing, four by reverse merger and two by IPO. He has prepared more than thirty private placements, closed eight M&A transactions himself and advised clients on dozens more.

His first listing came in 1999, when he took his own company public, writing the registration statement himself because no one would help a company that small. Once it was listed, a development firm took half its fee in stock, the PR agency took all of its fee in stock, a venture capitalist joined the board for options, and the company bought another business with its shares.

That's the lens you get, now on your side of the table: how lenders, investors and public markets value what you're building, whether a deal deserves to be done at all, and how to structure every deal so the holding company is worth more than the businesses inside it.