John L. Flannery Quotes

When you are buying companies, everyone in the company feels very good. Their chests are puffed out. At Blackstone, I used to tell people that there is nothing more fun than buying a company with somebody else's money. The business is growing, which creates more opportunity for your employees.

Companies buy customers when they cannot win new business on their own. They merge when their executives do not have a better idea of what to do.

We get talent and scale from mergers.

M&A guidelines need to be liberal.

We continue to see acquisitions as an opportunity area for us. It's one of the tools that we use to grow.

There are black companies that are very active in the economy, that are growing and not on the basis of mergers and acquisitions, but because of putting new money into their particular companies and, therefore, their particular sectors. Indeed, if they didn't do that, they would collapse as companies.

It used to be that you would go in to see a CEO, and you would ask them, 'Is your company for sale?' and if they said 'No, we have no interest in selling,' that was sort of the end of the conversation.

I buy companies for strategic reasons and operate them.

Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'

We are quite open, however, to looking at acquisitions and there are opportunities that we periodically consider. and I think that may be something we do in the future, but I must say that there is no commitment to that at the present time in any form or size.

Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.

We understand that conglomerates have no future.

We are reluctant to do these bigger acquisitions that are then integrated, especially if they are committed to a certain product that they want to build that we can't guarantee we will keep evolving.

VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.

Success in M&As comes with executing with vigour along with the obvious right choices that you got to make.

I come from the operations side of the business, and I buy companies to operate them, not to flip them.

You're doing a major merger, you got to hope you didn't get it wrong. That's the view of any CEO.

It's basic due diligence to make sure that whenever a foreign entity acquires a controlling interest in a U.S. company that national security isn't threatened.

As I have seen with a lot of companies I have covered, acquisition interest can be a heady experience, and not always in a good way.

Joint-stock companies are yet in their infancy, and incorporated capital, instead of being a thing which can be overturned, is a thing which is becoming more and more indispensable.

If guys try to make a bigger company for the sake of size, they don't create value in most cases.

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

We built that into a wholesale business that became, really, one of the largest companies in the United States. We had success in building new markets, opening markets for competition, and that takes a personal toll.

How do you make money? Spinoffs, split-ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions.

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.