How long does it take to identify ‘Tier 1’ M&A targets?

How long does it take for us to identify 80% of ‘Tier 1’ M&A targets?

At Artemis Origination we’ve carried out over 150 target scans in the technology and professional services sectors for strategic acquirers and private equity seeking to deploy capital successfully through M&A at the innovation frontier.

Our process has evolved by continuous improvement of our team and technologies – particularly in the last two years since we became a fully independent M&A origination specialist.

Some things have stayed the same, however, throughout the 6+ years that we’ve been doing this. Here are two of them:

1. In a multi-week, iterative shortlisting process, we classify each of ~50-100 fully profiled targets with our clients into tiers. Tier 1 means targets which, if as strategic and actionable as public/proprietary data suggests, our client would have strong interest in acquiring
2. ‘Multi-week’ means 5 weeks of iterative pooling, longlisting, shortlisting, scoring and debate. That’s what it takes to build an optimal target shortlist

Above we present data from our latest 20 scans. Note that it takes on average between 4 and 5 weeks to identify 80% of tier 1 targets. And, by the way, the third week yields more tier 1 targets than any other. Next time we’ll say why we think that third week is so productive.