Depending on your long-term goals and objectives and where you are in the lifecycle of your business, one way to provide a framework for thinking about your options can be to put yourself into one of two categories:

Whether you are a buyer or a seller:

Sellers can be those who are late in their business lifecycle and are looking to eventually realize and monetize the equity that they have built in their firms.

Sellers can also be “net buyers” who are in the early stages of their business and are looking to join a more established firm to gain scale, efficiencies and partial ownership of a larger enterprise by selling their business to the larger firm and assuming an ownership and managing role.

Buyers can be those who are in the business building stage in their business lifecycle and are looking to grow their capabilities, assets, revenues and market/geographic footprints through acquisition of selling firms.

Buyers can also be “net sellers” as they may be looking to acquire talent and management expertise that they can rely upon for their own exit strategy down the road.