A founder sells a company once. The buyer across the table may have closed thirty. That asymmetry is real in any deal, and it widens sharply the moment the buyer’s rule book was written in another country.
Cross-border is no longer the exception in the mid-market. In 2025, 39% of all mid-market transactions crossed a border, up from 33% the year before: 4,143 deals worth EUR 197bn, in the EUR 10m to EUR 500m range where founder-led and family-owned businesses live. The question for an owner is not whether a foreign buyer will appear, but whether anyone on the seller’s side will recognise what that buyer considers normal.
Consider a family-owned manufacturer in Portugal and a strategic buyer from Germany. Price is agreed in two meetings. Then the real negotiation starts. The buyer’s term sheet adjusts the price for working capital at closing, but the seller had assumed the number was the number. Neither is being difficult. In Europe, roughly half of private deals use a purchase price adjustment and the rest use a locked box, and the split varies by country and by deal size. A US buyer would use an adjustment mechanism nine times out of ten. Each side simply knows its own market.
The same pattern repeats on protections. Warranty packages that are routine in Frankfurt are unusual in Lisbon. A share sale and an asset sale can leave the seller with materially different net proceeds, and the difference is a function of local tax rules the buyer’s advisors have no reason to know. In our experience, the deals that wobble rarely wobble on headline price. They wobble on terms nobody explained early enough.
There is a second reason local knowledge pays. The current Argos Index shows investment funds paying a median 10.2x EBITDA in the eurozone mid-market against 7.9x for strategic buyers, and 27% of deals priced below 7x. Who is in the room decides the multiple. A buyer set assembled from one home market will not include the German family office or the French fund that would pay for a Portuguese asset.
This is what M&A Worldwide was built for. Since 2004, independent advisory firms, now around 40 of them across 45 countries, have worked as one network. Each member advises in its own market every day. When a mandate crosses a border, the colleague on the other side already knows how that market structures price, risk and tax, and says so before it becomes a dispute. Thirteen industry groups add the sector layer: who is buying in food and beverage, healthcare or advanced manufacturing, and which structures are closing.
For an owner, three practical consequences: a wider and better-priced buyer set, local issues on tax, law and employment surfaced while there is still time to solve them calmly, and one advisor to deal with, who brings in the network when it is needed.
None of this replaces preparation. Clean accounts, a clear story and a realistic view of value matter in every deal. But when the buyer comes from abroad, local knowledge on both sides is usually what keeps a good deal on track to closing. The best time to find out which rule book your buyer uses is before the first meeting, not after the second.