1- How long (average)does it take to acquire a company from the time you send the first email to the time the check clears in their bank account? 2- For every company you acquire how many companies do you look into and end up not buying?
1- It really depends: on the urgency, on the size of the company, on the specific synergies. Big deals can be done quickly if we're confident enough in the high level rationale to figure out the details later. But sometimes the details really matter, even in very small deals. Sometimes only a few weeks, sometimes it's an ongoing relationship over multiple years.
2- For every deal we look at a variety of companies in the space, at least two or three, usually more.