M&A Science

Jerry Cedicci never says, "trust me." He builds trust, then lets the deal speak for itself.
This is Part 2 of Kison's conversation with Jerry, The mentor who started with a French bakery and went on to build hundreds of millions in real estate across Chicago and Los Angeles. 
Part 1 told the story. 
Part 2 is the playbook: 
How Jerry gets a seller to hand over a business with no down payment
Why he never puts the first number on the table, and
Why the phrase "trust me" is the fastest way to lose his
Near the end, Kison brings Jerry a live deal: a competitor he's looking to acquire who won't share financials. Jerry works through it in real time, including what to ask for instead of the numbers, how to set a ceiling before you negotiate, and the exact offer he'd make.
What you'll learn
Remove the seller's downside before you ask for trust. Jerry structured his earliest deals so the seller kept all the leverage and could walk away anytime. He earned trust by giving it up first, not by asking for it.
Never say "trust me." Jerry treats those two words as a warning sign. He'd rather let his track record and what other people say about him do the talking.
Put a number on your ceiling before you negotiate. When Kison brought him a live acquisition target, Jerry's first question wasn't the asking price. It was Kison's own walk-away number and the value he thought he could create.
Ask for the metric a target will actually hand over. When a competitor won't open their books, skip the financials fight. Ask for client count instead, then work backward from what those clients are worth.
Treat a lender's "no" as a checklist, not a verdict. Jerry's response to every loan rejection was the same question: what exactly made you say no? Fix those things, then go to the next banker.
Separate opportunities from deals. Jerry only calls something a deal once it's closed. Everything before that is an opportunity he has to seize fast, not overthink.
Build at the high end so you stop competing on price. Jerry's rule on margin: build something nobody else can match, and you're no longer negotiating against 500 other bidders.
---
Turn what you heard into a repeatable M&A practice. Explore the Buyer-Led M&A™ Certification for practical frameworks, tools, and decision-making habits you can apply on your next deal.

Twenty years before M&A Science existed, Kison Patel learned how to spot a deal from a real estate developer named Jerry Cedicci. This episode tells Jerry's story: orphaned in France at age 7, he arrived in Chicago in 1981, speaking no English. He would go on to turn a French bakery counter into a real estate portfolio worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jerry opened his first Café Croissant on Walton Street in Chicago with a baker he'd hired sight unseen. What he lacked in market research, he more than made up for with conviction. The store did $1,500 on day one against a $450 target, then $60,000 in its first month. 
He used that cash flow to negotiate an option to buy his landlord's building and, ten years later, closed on it for $10 million.
From there, Jerry moved fully into real estate: rehabbing a derelict meatpacking building into condos, buying a struggling nightclub through his accountant, and converting a single-room-occupancy hotel into a five-star property he sold for $24 million. 
What you'll learn
Build conviction before you have proof. Jerry opened his first bakery with no market research and no baker, just a read on the neighborhood and a willingness to bet on it.

Turn early cash flow into structural rights, not just better terms. He used his bakery's daily revenue to negotiate a 10-year option to buy his landlord's building outright, thinking well beyond lower rent.

Buy the operator and the asset separately. When Jerry wanted a meatpacking building, he priced the business and the real estate as two separate offers and kept the owner on the payroll for six months to protect the operation while he refinanced.

Get a rejected loan explained line by line. After a bank turned him down, Jerry asked exactly why, then rebuilt his pitch for the next lender (and got the loan).

Scout a one-mile radius around your best location. He used a one-mile radius around his top-performing bakery to find the derelict building that became his first ground-up development project.

Negotiate the deal you want, not the one on offer. A landlord's refusal became a lease with better terms and an option to buy the building for a fraction of its appraised value.

---
Turn what you heard into a repeatable M&A practice. Explore the Buyer-Led M&A™ Certification for practical frameworks, tools, and decision-making habits you can apply on your next deal.

A rollup can look attractive at signing: cash today, equity in a larger platform, and the promise of participating in what gets built next. But sellers rarely spend as much time understanding what sits above that equity, what has to happen before it becomes liquid, or whose economics take priority when the platform eventually exits.
Bill Johnson, Founder, Chairman & CEO of The Liberty Company Insurance Brokers, has completed roughly 50 acquisitions while building Liberty without PE equity capital. He joins Kison Patel to challenge some of the assumptions behind acquisition-led growth and explore what buyers and sellers often discover only after the deal is done.
What You'll Learn
What sellers should understand about common vs. preferred equity

How investor timelines can change deal economics after close

Why seller character is so difficult to diligence

What happens when acquisition growth outruns integration capacity

How Liberty balanced M&A, organic growth, and leverage

When red flags between LOI and close should make you walk away

---
You can do fifty deals and still run into something you've never seen before. DealPilot , powered by M&A Science, gives you practitioner-built guidance from 400+ interviews and thousands of real acquisitions. When the playbook stops working, know what to do next.

Integration problems often get blamed on culture after close. The real issue may have started earlier, when leaders were never given enough clarity on how to operate inside the new company. Kim Jones is an HR Director of M&A with more than a decade of people-integration experience across deals ranging from single-employee acqui-hires to acquisitions involving thousands of people.
In this episode, Kim shares how to avoid integration debt, what to do when trust and operating rhythms start to break down, and the stories that shaped her approach, including a CEO who delayed his own close and a butterscotch Life Savers incident that sparked an employee uprising. 
What You'll Learn
Why experienced leaders still need onboarding after an acquisition

What creates integration debt before the deal even closes

How to define "you'll run independently" before it becomes a source of friction

The retention question Kim asks before deciding where to spend retention dollars

Why integration planning should start around LOI, not Day One

How to spot the people who actually hold influence, even when the org chart doesn't show it

What buyers should preserve from the target before replacing its operating rhythms

If you're planning an integration and trying to get leadership aligned before close, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, gives you practitioner-built guidance for the decisions that shape Day One and what comes after.

Praveen Ghanta, Founder and CEO of DevHawk
Signing the LOI can feel like you've won. For the seller, it may actually be the moment when the balance of power starts moving the other way.
Praveen Ghanta learned that firsthand while selling HiddenLevers. A key enterprise contract slipped during diligence, the valuation story changed, and just before the diligence period expired, the buyer came back asking to reprice the deal by nearly 50%. What followed was a tense negotiation over how much to concede, what to protect, and when walking away becomes the better option.
What You'll Learn
Why seller leverage changes after signing an LOI
What should be defined before entering exclusivity
How to think about your walkaway number
What diligence feels like from the seller's side
Where buyers can unintentionally destroy what made an acquisition valuable
What Praveen would do differently after going through the process himself
 

When diligence changes the deal, the hardest question is knowing what to defend and what to give up. DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the deal frameworks and negotiation playbooks practitioners have used to make that call themselves.
____________________
This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.
51% of corp dev teams are already using AI in their deals.
We surveyed 230+ practitioners on where AI is showing up across sourcing, diligence, integration, and internal workflows, what's working, what's holding teams back, and where the biggest opportunity is over the next 12 to 24 months.
Grab your free copy of the full report: https://hubs.ly/Q04sM2m30
____________________
Episode Chapters
[00:00] Intro
[03:04] Two Decades of Bootstrapped Exits
[04:07] Lesson From an Early Failure
[07:38] Building Hidden Levers From Scratch
[14:49] The Road to Ten Million ARR
[18:48] Picking a Banker Without a Bake-off
[22:43] When the Anchor Deal Collapsed
[34:41] Power Shifts After the LOI
[36:46] Strategic Buyers Beat Private Equity
[32:05] How IRR Misleads Retail Investors
[35:03] Why Secondaries Data Can't Be Trusted
[40:07] What Belongs in the LOI
[43:04] The Sales Tax Surprise
[47:03] Two Diligence Teams, One Model
[48:21] Integration Wins and Losses
[50:15] What the Buyer Should Have Done
[53:16] Staying Sane Through Renegotiation