The entire industry around M&A exists to play on one emotion in its clients. Fear.
Fear will be stoked in you from the first meeting with any advisors. All of the people who are supposedly on your side know, the more afraid the customer is, the higher percentage of the deal price they can extract.
Fear that you could have negotiated a higher price, fear that you are going to lose the deal, fear that you will agree to a term that will screw you in the long term.
Once you are sufficiently afraid, you will then not bat an eye about spending literally millions of dollars for the mundane services they provide and feeling good about it.
There was just some discussion about this on /r/RealEstate. Apparently a 60 hour class and a multiple choice exam are all that's between you and a real estate license. I had no idea the threshold was so low.
Any fool can get a real estate license. The hard parts are joining a brokerage (owners usually don't want to take on random new agents) and then finding clients. In California the majority of license holders did zero transactions last year.
Here in Hawaii at least, the hiring process is actually reversed from most careers. You pay a variety of fees just to park your license there - wether or not you actually complete a transaction. Most brokerages will hire anyone so long as they aren’t actively damaging the reputation of the firm.
This is the least of how M&A is broken.
The entire industry around M&A exists to play on one emotion in its clients. Fear.
Fear will be stoked in you from the first meeting with any advisors. All of the people who are supposedly on your side know, the more afraid the customer is, the higher percentage of the deal price they can extract.
Fear that you could have negotiated a higher price, fear that you are going to lose the deal, fear that you will agree to a term that will screw you in the long term.
Once you are sufficiently afraid, you will then not bat an eye about spending literally millions of dollars for the mundane services they provide and feeling good about it.