Artis Partners’ Victor Basta: The Three Secrets of a Successful Exit

Launched in December 2024, Artis Partners is a boutique investment bank that provides a range of services to high-growth tech firms, including scaling support, growth financing and M&A consultations. Artis operates in both the US and Europe, with a focus on firms in the artificial intelligence (AI), fintech, software-as-a-service and healthcare themes. 

With a career spanning three decades, Victor Basta brings his considerable M&A expertise to Artis as the bank’s co-founder and managing partner. He has advised on over 130 transactions, helping firms position themselves to be bought, not sold — and, in doing so, maximize the final sale price. 

What’s the number one thing that Basta has learned about M&As across his career? “There’s no rocket science … it’s just another business process.”

An exit is “hard to do, but it’s very simple to explain. It’s money and risk.” 

Basta has learned a few tricks over the years to help companies get the most out of the M&A process. 

The CEO Equation

A successful exit relies on three key factors, he outlines. 

First and foremost, not waiting for the optimal time to sell. Rather, the most successful deals happen when “companies sell slightly uncomfortably early.”

“What I tell CEOs is that it is the height of arrogance to believe you can choose your own timing … Buyers will largely choose that for you.” 

Basta offers the metaphor of a steak cooking. When the steak starts sizzling on the grill, it grabs people’s attention and gets their bellies rumbling. But once it’s past that peak, even if it’s perfectly well done, it’s just not as appealing. 

Turning down an early offer could result in settling for a lower price down the line — or, worse, having your potential buyer snap up your competitors, and seeing your own valuation shrink as a result. 

The second key factor is board alignment. “Maybe the biggest shareholder has their own entirely individual reasons for waiting or wanting to move quickly. Maybe they need to get some liquidity. It’s really a bad idea to go sell a business based only on that.”

The third and arguably most important factor, Basta argues, is an experienced chairperson.

“The CEOs are either the strongest link or the weakest link in doing exits. It’s going to benefit the CEO oftentimes more than anybody else. And yet they are the least prepared.”

Even if the CEO has not handled an exit before, Basta explains, the key thing is to think of it like any other market process, and dedicate time to preparing. 

“90% of CEOs woefully underprepare … we don’t want you spending 90% of your time doing exit preparation. That would be insane, right? You’d be spending 10–15 % of your time. 80% spend zero to 1%.”

Ultimately, the CEO matters so much to the process because they stand to gain more than anyone else in the company. 

In the average deal, for example, “a big chunk of it goes to investors. The last 50% is really going to founders, the CEOs, so getting this right really, really matters to them. Leaving some money on the table is a disproportionate hit.”

Being Bought, Not Sold

According to Basta, the “dirty little secret” to being bought, not sold — that is, setting the optimal terms for your company to be acquired — is that it “requires a fair amount of selling beforehand. You just don’t call it selling.”

The objective of this “marketing before the selling phase” is to “market your story … with real intention toward potential buyers”. And, if all goes well, toward the end of this process you will “have one or two or three buyers seriously at the table who have approached you — although they’ve been cultivated, right? It’s their idea. Timing works for them. They’re interested in buying you. They know enough that they understand the company, understand the opportunity.”

This is the opposite approach to what is traditionally done by companies looking to be acquired, which is to send an information memorandum about the company to the widest range of potential buyers. 

“The traditional argument is that that works because you create maximum competition by creating maximum exposure,” Basta explains. Unfortunately, it rarely works, “because everybody’s evaluating the business as an asset … They need to make an offer with partial information. You also are leaving the whole opportunity for them to really grasp what the [company’s] full value is, so getting an outstanding price is usually harder.”

Another important factor is understanding the perspective of potential buyers. “Almost every growth board and CEO looks at [the M&A process] as money … They never think about risk, really. Why? Because they’re doing this job. They’ve already decided that they have no problem with risk.”

With buyers, however, questions of risk are front and center. “Is this going to fall apart after we buy it? Are these people we can work with? Will they fit in an organization? If I try and sell this product through my sales channel, will it really work or will I have a problem?”

The risk-money connection is an intrinsic factor in the final price tag agreed upon at the end of the process. “The bigger the company, the more risk inclined they are. The bigger the company, the more they can pay for it in acquisition. So the greater the amount of money, more often than not, the more important risk is.”

What’s really on the table in the M&A process? For CEOs, Basta says, the stakes are nothing less than generational wealth. “This is the one opportunity perhaps in my life when I will be able to provide for the next two, three, four, five generations.”

That being said, Basta admits that it can be hard for founders to remain objective during the exit process. “If you or I have been doing something with intensity for five, 10, 15 years, how can you shift gears? How can you become dispassionate? How can you look at it as an asset? You can’t. And yet part of you has to.”