MPP010 – Business Acquisition Advice from a Corporate Commercial Lawyer The Mad Profit Podcast

https://youtu.be/ZL_9pIIYDw0









Interview with Louie Sopov of Prouse, Dash & Crouch LLP







Episode 10 of the Mad Profit Podcast we speak with Louie Sopov, a corporate commercial lawyer with over 15 years experience of M&A and commercial business helps explain to us what to expect when purchasing a business.







His provides great insight on topics such as cross border jurisdiction, due diligence, contract structure and finding the right legal partner when buying or starting a business.















Transcript







INTRO: Welcome to the Mad Profit Podcast, where we interview active investors, entrepreneurs and experts, who left corporate jobs to buy or start successful ventures and live life on their own terms. Listen to their stories, learn from their experiences and heed their advice, so you too can create mad profits and the life you've always wanted and now here's your Host Laurent true.   LAURENT TRUC: Welcome back this is Laurent true from the mad profit podcast. Thank you for joining everybody today we have a very special guest with us. I've been getting a lot of questions lately from entrepreneurs about how do I start a company? What should the corporate structure look like? So today we're doing something a little bit different. Instead of having an entrepreneur, we decided to have a corporate commercial lawyer on with us. So, Louie thank you very much for joining, welcome to the mad profit podcast.   LOUIE SOPOV: Thank you so much Laurent, it's a real pleasure to be with you today.   LAURENT TRUC: Well, thanks for taking the time. So, Louie I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I think the easiest thing to do is to have you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. So, if you don't mind can you give us a bit of history.   LOUIE SOPOV: Absolutely! I've been practicing law for the last 20 years, the last 15 of those 20 have been exclusively in the corporate commercial area. I'm with a small to mid-size firm out here in Brampton and a lot of our business is small to mid-size, ranging in types of industry. We do a large gamut of things, everything from mergers acquisitions to corporate structuring, tax planning, commercial leasing. If you will sort of the jack-of-all-trades within a particular expertise, but that's the core of what I do and what I've been doing for the last 15 years. Excellence! This is gonna be good, then a lot of knowledge.   LAURENT TRUC: Perfect! So, a lot of what I've been doing is talking to people about acquiring businesses as much as starting businesses from scratch. You've done a lot of M&A and business acquisition. Just to kind of start us off, can you walk us through the general steps that somebody would take? So, if they find a business that they like and they want to go through an acquisition process, I assume it's different whether it's a small business versus a larger one, but are there kind of always the same general steps? Like what does that process look like?   LOUIE SOPOV: As a general rule the only difference between small, large transactions, the number of zeros attached to the price tag. Okay generally speaking what we're always worried about and everybody's heard this phrase before "Caveat Emptor" its "Buyer Beware". So effectively where you would normally go out and buy a vehicle and it comes with a warranty and guarantee package about a foot thick and if something goes boom someone magically fixes it.   What the average buyer is going to be concerned about is what they don't know. I think the biggest problem for most entrepreneurs when they're thinking about starting a new business is they have an idea of where their expertise area is, so they focus in on an industry and then they try to look at the surface issues which is part of it,