Building your £1m to £5m business was never an easy ride...
WHO WE WORK WITH
Most of the companies we talk to have taken 10 to 30 years to build.
Somewhere in those years there was a month when payroll came out of your personal account, a customer walked away and another who stayed and made everything possible.
There was a period when nobody at home saw much of you. None of that shows up in the accounts.
When an owner starts to think about selling, price is rarely the whole of it.
The harder questions are what happens to the people who have been there more than 10 years, whether the name stays above the door, and whether the thing that took a working life to build is still recognisable in a decade.
Those are the questions we are set up to answer.
WHAT WE DO
[01]
The name
The business keeps its name, its brand and its way of doing things unless there is a strong commercial reason to change it and the owner agrees.
[02]
The team
We buy companies because of the people in them. Removing people to increase profits are not part of our way of doing things.
[03]
The business
Most owner-run businesses reach a point where the next step needs more capital or more management than one person can reasonably supply. That is usually where we come in.
WHAT AN ACQUISITION LOOKS LIKE
This is the space to share a review from one of your business's clients or customers.
Selling a company is unfamiliar territory for most owners and the process, as usually described, is off-putting. Ours is considered and paced to suit the seller, fast or slow.
1. A conversation. No documents, no accounts, no non-disclosure agreement. We talk about the business and about what you want to happen. Plenty of these conversations lead nowhere and that is a perfectly good outcome.
2. A closer look. If both sides want to continue, we sign a short confidentiality agreement and you send us three years of figures. We come back to you with a straight answer about whether we can act and we talk about options for how to structure a deal that works for all parties.
3. An offer. If we make one, it is a number that we believe will work for all parties. Included would be the structure that we propose will achieve goals on both sides: fairness, workability and survival of the business.
4. Completion. Our lawyers, accountants and funding are arranged before we start, so the timetable depends on the business rather than on us waiting for someone to say yes. Most transactions of this size take six weeks to six months from offer.
5. Transition. The most important step. The detail of what is needed to ensure the long term survival of the business you built. Consultancy, personnel, cash flow.
WHAT IF YOU'RE NOT READY YET?
ABOUT
Many of the owners we talk to are some time away from doing anything. That is a good time to talk, not a bad one.
A business that has been prepared properly is worth materially more than the same business sold in a hurry, and most of the value comes from unglamorous work.
Getting the management accounts into order. Reducing how much depends on the owner personally. Tidying up customer contracts, property leases and the shareholding. Sorting out the things that a buyer's solicitor will find and use to reduce the price.
We do this work as a consulting engagement. Some of these clients eventually sell to us. Most sell to somebody else or decide not to sell at all, and the work stands up either way.
