You sell a company once. Everyone else at the table does it for a living.
The banker is paid when the deal closes, on a percentage that shrinks as the price rises. The private equity fund has a clock set by its investors, not by you. The venture fund needs one company in twenty to return the whole fund, and a business that merely makes you wealthy is, to its model, a disappointment. The lender, the lawyer, the accountant, and the corporate development executive across the table are each paid on a formula you could read, if anyone showed it to you. Nobody does.
Funds Flow is the founder's map of that table. Mark Kummer has spent more than twenty-five years in trucking and logistics, buying companies, selling them, raising money for them, and turning one around from the inside. He opens with three true stories: an advisory firm that blasted three hundred teasers into a small industry and triggered the bankruptcy it was hired to prevent; a founder's digital brokerage anchored to a pandemic valuation no buyer would pay; and an audit partner who ended a management call with a spoken countdown to zero. Then he takes the machine apart, piece by piece.
In plain language, with every term defined where it first appears, the book explains how a bank decides to lend and what a factor watches more closely than your banker does. What a valuation actually means, and how fifty million dollars becomes something much smaller by the time it reaches your account. How private equity, venture capital, and private credit funds are built and paid, and why each behaves the way it does. Who sits in the room, and who pays each of them. Where capital comes from, how to reach the patient kind directly, and how to take chips off the table without giving up the table.
Then it walks the transaction in the order you will live it: hiring the banker, defining the process, getting the company ready, going to market, getting to a price and a letter of intent, and negotiating the final documents. The last chapters cover the closing statement the book is named for, and the founder who does not need to sell at all.
Every chapter ends with what should have happened and a checklist of questions to ask and answers to distrust.
The founder is the principal. The advisors are employees. This book is the fee schedule they never hand you.
