George and David have made remarkably little progress on their business offer since our last meeting. They won't be seeing their new business lawyer until tomorrow, but since I'm leaving on vacation Friday night they wanted to see if I could meet late this afternoon. I agreed, not knowing why they wanted to meet.
When we met they asked if I had a chance to review their last numbers, like the ball was somehow in my court. Not sure where they were going with this, I told them yes, I had looked at them, but (a) I told them I thought my offer was reasonable, and we discussed that they needed to talk to a tax lawyer, and (b) I was under the impression they were going to take their work to their new lawyer and discuss everything with him.
They seemed a little upset, so I kept asking if there was something I was supposed to have done. If I have any strength in meetings at all, it's usually in summarizing the meeting and assigning action items, and it was very clear to me that there was nothing for me to do after our last meeting.
We somehow managed to move from there to them asking me what I thought of their last numbers, and I again told them honestly I didn't agree with a lot of it. I told them I couldn't think about the tax consequences of them buying the company, because (a) Marty never included that in his calculations, and (b) my lawyers had told me it was perfectly correct for me not to think of those, that if I sold to an outside entity this wouldn't be an issue, and again, they needed to talk to a lawyer about how to handle this from their end.
I also rebutted a lot of their other methods for trying to give me a lowball number, but I also said, "Listen, you need to talk to your business attorney before we really talk about this any more. I'm sure they'll have more to add, and there's no use in us getting into all of this right now."
I don't know where they're coming from right now, but they seem nervous again.
