Finding a Buyer Who Values Your Legacy

**Ibrahim Abdel Rahim** (0:00)
Duos come with a bit of a baggage, because they could fight, maybe one of them is good, the other is not, so there is a bit of that.
That said, the searchers are usually not ex-CEOs. They've never ran a company before. They are really talented, but it's not something they've done before. So having two of them, it is one of the hardest jobs that one can do. That said, searchers always want to close. Searchers are quite lenient because they want to close. Logically, they've been doing this for two years. It's very hard. Once they find the business they want, they do anything to close it.
If any of your listeners wants to invest in search funds, it's a great place to invest, but it is a full-time job. You need to know that if you don't support searchers, you won't get to good searchers. Because searchers talk to each other all the time.

**Jacob Oros** (0:49)
Welcome to M&A Talk, the number one podcast on selling a business brought to you by Morgan & Westfield, a boutique M&A firm specializing in the sale of small to mid-sized companies.
I'm your host and president of Morgan & Westfield, Jacob Oros. If you're considering selling your business and you'd like to work with me throughout the process, you can schedule a free consultation at morganandwestfield.com. Or if you'd like my team and I to perform a valuation of your company for a one-time fee of $1,500, visit morganandwestfield.com or see the link in the show notes.
And today, we're going to have Ibrahim Abdel Rahim of Moonbase Capital. Ibrahim is an investor in search funds, is a full-time investor. He's done like 11 deals at this point, worked with over 50 searchers. And we are going to talk about the world of search fund, acquirers, search fund entrepreneurs and investors. And if you're a seller, this is a very important show for you to listen to. As you may know by now, searchers are a major investor in companies, depending on the size of company and the type of company that you have. And if you're selling a company in the lower middle market, chances are very high that you will encounter searchers who may be looking to buy your company. And this show will be very insightful for you. And Ibrahim, welcome to the show.

**Ibrahim Abdel Rahim** (2:13)
Thanks, Jacob. Happy to be here.

**Jacob Oros** (2:16)
So you are a search fund expert. Tell us exactly what you do in the search fund world.

**Ibrahim Abdel Rahim** (2:21)
I mean, the word expert is a big word. I've been, I've been, I started investing in search funds end of 2020 So it's been five years now, which in this world is quite an expert because it's such a fast growing world. So yeah, five years already doing it full time is quite a bit. I, we, we started Moonbase, as I said, end of 2020 We've been so far have invested in maybe 50 searchers.
We started off mainly in Europe. So Europe is still our, our, our strongest part. We are based in Barcelona.
However, recently we've invested all over the world. So we've invested in Brazil, searchers in Brazil, in Mexico, in Singapore, in China and India. So we're, we're, we're growing our geography quite a bit. In terms of acquisitions we've done, we're working now on our 10th and 11th acquisitions. So we've done quite a few so far and I love it. It's a really exciting space.

**Jacob Oros** (3:28)
How do you get into that by the way?

**Ibrahim Abdel Rahim** (3:30)
So I went to Stanford to study, to, to, to, I was, I was interested to learn about tech and Silicon Valley. So I, I joined a program, a one year master's program at Stanford in order to get into the Silicon Valley world.
Little did I know, I learned about search funds. And I'm originally an SME guy. My father had an SME, I'm from Egypt. So I, my, my, my story starts with Egypt with running, first working in the SME and then working as a, as a, as a consultant in McKinsey for four years. And then, and then eventually selling our company and then going to Stanford. So it's a bit of SME and operations. And at Stanford, when I heard about search runs, I was very excited and I decided that's what I want to do. And I built Moonbase around this whole operational helping searchers angle.

**Jacob Oros** (4:24)
What size deals are you typically working on?

**Ibrahim Abdel Rahim** (4:27)
So we work usually on deals between one and five million euros, EBITDA. So it's, it's EBITDA of one to five million euros.