Acquisition Criteria

We are looking to buy small independent companies with the following attributes:

Established reputation, engaged workforce, and satisfied customers.
Strong and motivated management familiar with the operations, that does not rely on external input.
At least 8 years' trading history.
Consistently profitable, with healthy margins and strong cash-flow.
8-50 employees.
Revenue of £1-4m.

Pre-sale process

We sign a non-disclosure agreement so that you feel comfortable sharing your accounts with us.
We meet in order to get to know each other better, understand your business, and answer any questions that you may have on our approach.
We will make an offer to buy your company based on our formula for valuation.
We can also provide a non-binding letter of intent at this stage, which is a written expression of our interest in your business.
On agreement on our offer, we then conduct the requisite due diligence to check that all accounts are correctly reported.
If all parties are in agreement, we sign the forms to acquire the shares and proceed with payment.

Post-Sale

Your business continues to operate as independently as before, without changes to operations, staffing, branding or culture.

We will:

Set the dividend policy.
Be responsible for appointing the managing director. In reality this means deciding on management succession as and when that happens, and will almost certainly based current management's recommendation.
Conduct monthly financial reviews and organise a yearly audit.

Most importantly, we will step back and allow the business to be run by those who know it best.

Why do we work in this way?

We want to preserve successful, independent businesses and their people, and provide a home for their legacy.

Why? We believe it is the best way to assure their continued success, and in doing so, we will attract dedicated business owners such as yourself who are proud of what they have achieved and care about long-term success. These are the people that we would like to partner with.

We also want to attract sellers that want to stay. Why? Because they have proven their skills by running a successful company in an extremely competitive field. They are top performers. We couldn't run the businesses better ourselves.