Acquisition Financing

  

You run IHeartCholesterol, a 100-store pizza chain. You have no debt and small cash amounts. You have used extra cash historically to buy or open additional pizza parlors.

But now along comes MetabolismKillers, a chain of 40 pizza parlors. They want 20 million bucks for you to buy all of them, and the parlors themselves currently produce each year about a million bucks in cash. You think that, with your buying leverage of cheese and dough and oven rentals, you could make the acquisition produce cash flow of a million-and-a-half bucks in Year One just by virtue of lowering expenses on volume purchases of the stuff you put on the pizzas.

Minor problem: You don't have 20 million bucks laying around. Your own existing business has cash flow of about $3 million a year. Combined, you'd have $4.5 million a year in cash flow, and that should be enough to quickly pay off the Acquisition Financing of $20 million you want to raise from your kindly loving bankers, who are all too happy to loan you the money at onerous terms.

If things go well, you grow great; if they don't, the financiers likely take ownership of your pizza chain and all your hard work is wizzed away, like the soda you drank three hours ago.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is Debt-to-EBITDA?58 Views

00:00

finance a la shmoop what is the debt to EBITDA ratio alright people well

00:08

anytime you see that to in there a pretty good chance we're dealing with a [Person writes ratio on chalkboard]

00:11

ratio and yeah this one's a ratio that compares what a company owes in debt to

00:17

its EBITDA or earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization

00:21

otherwise lovingly known on Wall Street as cash flow like the cash it produces [Cash falls from sky]

00:27

alright well the numbers used by bankers and investors to see how leveraged is a

00:30

company is and evaluate its creditworthiness the higher the number

00:34

the more likely it is that a company will struggle to pay up its debt.. Well,

00:39

let's use a couple of practical examples here, a demo;

00:44

if your friend Deb wants

00:46

to borrow five grand from you maybe Deb just doesn't want her pops to

00:50

know she you know dented the car she's not the best driver in the world and

00:54

Deb's a two on the friend reliability scale like you totally trust her and [Deb moving side to side on reliability scale]

00:58

she's a lawyer and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year suing people

01:03

for stuff all right well after living expenses she has cash flow personally of

01:08

some fifty grand a year that she socks away in a mattress you know what she [Deb places cash under mattress]

01:12

sleeps on so you'd go ahead and make the loan to Deborah and you'd have no doubt

01:17

that she has the dough to pay you back your five grand the debt to EBITDA in

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this situation five grand over 50 grand or one to ten or 0.1 very low debt to

01:30

EBITDA ratio there very safe bet she'll pay you back your five grand

01:35

well this logic applies to loaning companies money as well the five grand [Man discussing loans outside Amazon building]

01:39

in debt is quote money good unquote and you don't lose sleep over loaning them

01:43

that money if they have good credit and low debt to EBITDA doubt ratios right they

01:48

have more than enough cash flow to cover that debt well so then what's bad debt

01:52

to EBITDA ratio like what does that look like well it's when you have debt

01:55

of more than three or four five times cash flow some companies go even higher [Bad debt-to-EBITDA ratio example]

01:59

so if whatever dot-com has 50 million dollars in cash flow but three hundred

02:05

million dollars in debt that's a really high debt to EBITDA ratio of three

02:10

hundred over fifty or six to one or you just say

02:13

6x if that debt costs a 8% a year to rent well then the total cost just to pay

02:19

interest is 24 mil or almost half of all the company's cash flow for the entire

02:25

company and remember they got to be paying down the principal as they go [Whatever.com's cash flow debt]

02:28

along as well so it's a huge percentage of their cash flow just goes to the bank

02:32

should whatever com stumble and maybe you don't know interest rates go up as

02:36

well well then things could get ugly really fast and yes even uglier than [Deb driving a car in a storm]

02:40

this so yeah you want low debt to EBITDA ratios not high ones unless you're a

02:45

real dice roller there [Debt laid in hospital bed]

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