Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Goodman.
Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m an accidental Austinite. I intended to attend Rice University after high school, with Tulane as my second choice. A sports injury and an attractive academic scholarship with the Terry Foundation meant I was Austin-bound to the University of Texas. The incredible impact of this small branch in my story landed me in what would be an economic boomtown over the next 20 years. It’s a good thing I had that knee injury! After my education at the University of Texas, I was employed in the legal field, financial services, and an oil and gas services company. Eventually, I found a home at an agency servicing Fortune 500 brands. I had the incredible opportunity to work with household names like Dell, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly, and Intel. I started at the company, basically organizing purchase orders. Ultimately, I led a large team on multiple continents and handled a multi-million dollar portfolio as Director of Client Services. It was an incredible education in various sectors, watching the ebb and flow of companies as they brought new products and services to market, grew by organic growth or acquisition, or responded to various economic changes and conditions.
I resisted entrepreneurship but always had a side hustle going. Over time, I built up a small residential real estate portfolio as a landlord and was completing small angel and real estate investment projects. As all of my projects and properties are self-managed, it was also an education about managing a business enterprise, even though I didn’t consider it in that light at the time. Just before the pandemic disrupted our lives, the idea of entrepreneurship by acquisition hit my radar. I’d been increasingly interested in completing an acquisition and taking all the skills I’d learned to become a full-time CEO. While my husband and I ultimately completed an acquisition, my experience with the business brokerage space left much to be desired.
I saw the incredible opportunity for a different player in the space. After a couple of years of pursuing my own M&A projects and actively working as a lower-market broker with a boutique business group – I saw the opportunity to launch my own M&A advisory firm as majority owner alongside my partner Mark Eiland. Statistics vary depending on the source, but a very low percentage of M&A firms are owned by women, potentially as low as 2%, and around 10% of transactions have a woman leading the deal (either in the advisor role or lead attorney). This is despite evidence that women-led transactions have better outcomes! https://www.intralinks.com/blog/2022/03/how-female-ma-dealmakers-won-pandemic
When I set out and formed my firm, I was a little terrified I’d have zero clients. I steeled myself and said that I’d rather fail trying to build the firm in my mind’s eye than continue to wonder what could be possible. After an entire career building other companies, I bet on myself and launched Eminence M&A Strategies. Any concern about the appetite for our services evaporated immediately, as from Day 1, we had a full client roster and are so lucky to have new clients entrusting us with their M&A projects.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, has it been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I expected to have zero clients and some time to put some necessary infrastructure together, but as we started with a full client roster, it was a little bit of building the rocket ship while it flew through the air! I am so thankful for the trust and grace provided by our first clients; they were incredibly generous with their support and patience as we launched. Shortly after our launch, two major transactions fell apart, which felt like a huge setback. One project evaporated after months of work due to the Silicon Valley Bank crisis in March 2023, and another project failed to fund, as the buyer’s equity partner had committed wire fraud. These two items were out of our control but were both very negative for our clients and our firm. In M&A, our revenues are primarily driven by commissions on successfully closed transactions, so these early losses were tough! We cwould continue working with these clients to replace these buyers, but it was still a bit of a gut punch. Additionally, 2023 was a challenging year for M&A with credit tightening, economic uncertainty, and rising interest rates. I joked – if we can be successful in a year with a near collapse of banks, record interest rate hikes, and firms closing their doors, we will thrive in a more hospitable environment.
As you know, we’re big fans of Eminence M&A Strategies, LLC. What can you tell our readers who might need to be more familiar with the brand?
Eminence M&A Strategies was founded with a laser-focused vision to help owners successfully exit their businesses. Our ideal client is a privately held business with $5-50MM in revenue. We’re industry agnostic, but we have deep experience in manufacturing, industrials, construction, commercial real estate tangent businesses, wholesale and distribution operations. We offer a 360-degree concierge approach to helping business owners navigate the sale of their business, a process rife with pitfalls. More than 70% of businesses that desire to be acquired fail to do so. Our goal is to sell 100% of the businesses we represent successfully. From a market perspective, we sit in the much-needed space to support business owners who are uninterested or too small for traditional investment banking (middle market over $100MM) and need more support than a local business broker. We’re on the block between Main Street and Wall Street. I’m most proud that we’ve built a customer-centric brand in an industry with a mixed reputation and often misaligned incentives.
We spend time making intensive discoveries, listening to our sellers and buyers, and building custom strategies for each client to achieve their goals. I’m also proud of the work we do on a complimentary basis to educate young buyers and entrepreneurs as the next generation of acquirers.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you, and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share?
People and relationships are everything. As I left an agency serving Fortune 500 clients and built a firm targeting lower middle-market business owners, I had to construct a support network around myself. It has been my most personally and professionally rewarding effort to build meaningful and reciprocal relationships with other entrepreneurs and firms in my community. 2023 was not a great year for M&A or many businesses, but it was a successful year for me because of the work of relationship-building and supporting others will continue to fuel us forward for decades to come.’
Contact Info:
- Website: eminencestrategies.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmgoodman/
- Other: https://www.sarahgoodman.co/
Image Credits
Main headshot – Eryn Brooke, www.erynbrooke.com, Headshot looking down – Eryn Brooke, www.erynbrooke.com, Family Photo – Alison Eden, https://www.alisoneden.com/ Panel Photos – non-pro photos
