Our Strategy · For business owners
A permanent home for the business you built.
You spent years building a business that makes money, keeps its customers, and employs people who matter to you. The Group buys businesses like that in order to keep them. This page says plainly what that means, what the Group will ask of you, and how a sale runs from the first conversation to completion.
Your people, your name, your customers.
The Group keeps the brand, the team, and the customer relationships of every business it acquires, and runs it as part of a group whose other businesses become its suppliers and its customers. There is no fund to return capital to and no date on which the business must be sold again. The Group’s owners are its principals and its Board; the decision to buy your business is theirs, and they will make it in person.
The Group prices what a business has done, so it will ask to see it: three years of accounts, current management information, and the cohort and channel data that show who your customers are and how they return. It will ask you for candour about what is not in the accounts, and it will ask you to stay for a period after completion and to keep an interest in the business, because that is how the price the Group pays and the truth of the business stay aligned.
From first conversation to completion
Six stages, each with a timetable.
- 1. Conversation (Within ten days) A confidential conversation between the owner and a principal.
- 2. Information (As supplied) A confidentiality agreement; three years of accounts, management information, and cohort data.
- 3. Letter of intent (Ten working days) Price, structure, and timetable in writing; the terms do not move afterwards.
- 4. Diligence (Sixty days) Quality of earnings, legal, tax, cyber, and background checks, under exclusivity.
- 5. Agreement (Negotiated once) Warranties, a locked-box price, a retention, and restrictive covenants.
- 6. Completion (Day one) Cash at completion; treasury control; the first hundred days begin the same morning.
From the first conversation to completion in six stages, each with a timetable and an undertaking from the Group. Touch a stage to see what happens in it.
The first hundred days.
Within ten days, the Group takes control of treasury and tells your people, in person, what has happened and what will not change. Within thirty, your second-line management is confirmed with retention agreements and your accounts move onto the Group’s monthly reporting. Within sixty, your supplier terms are reviewed and your own transition plan, whether you stay, step back, or leave on the terms agreed, is settled in writing. Within a hundred, the plan for the business’s next three years is fixed with you, and reported against every month thereafter.
Three undertakings.
The Group will not run an auction, or take part in one, and it will not ask you to. It will not renegotiate the price it has offered after the letter of intent, except for a matter the diligence uncovers that you did not disclose; and any such adjustment is downward only, stated in writing, with its reason. It will not approach your staff, your customers, or your suppliers before you say it may.
Questions owners ask
Answered plainly.
Will my staff keep their jobs?
The Group buys businesses for their people as well as their earnings; retention agreements for your second line are part of the first thirty days, and the Group’s own recruitment businesses exist to hire, not to cut. What changes is the finance function, which moves onto the Group’s system.
Will the name change?
No. A name that has earned its standing keeps it.
Do I have to stay?
For a period, yes; the length is agreed in the heads of terms. After it you may stay, step back, or leave, on the terms agreed at the outset.
How long does it take?
A letter of intent within ten working days of the data room; sixty days of exclusivity; completion when the diligence and the documents allow. The Group does not run protracted processes.
How is the price paid?
The greater part in cash at completion; the balance in a vendor loan note, deferred consideration, or an earn-out, agreed with you. The structure is set out in the letter of intent and does not move afterwards except for a matter the diligence uncovers.
Who else will know?
Nobody, until you decide. Every conversation is held under confidentiality, and the Group does not announce transactions it has not completed.
Contact
Write to a principal.
Tell the Group, in a paragraph, what your business does, roughly what it earns, and where it trades. A principal will reply within two working days, in confidence.