Buy-side M&A. Food and drink only.
Origination through to completion, for trade buyers, search funds, private equity, family offices and management teams buying out.
Combined turnover of the six companies I acquired, across four transactions
Acquisition finance raised through tier one and challenger banks
At a time, and I do the work myself
Target turnover
Both sides of the table
I have started businesses, sold them, bought other people's, and seen what happens when an acquisition goes wrong afterwards.
That gives me both sides of the table: how a seller watches their business being taken apart, and how it looks from the acquirer's side of the same conversation.
I have integrated businesses after completion and sat in board oversight afterwards, so the work does not stop when the money moves, which is where most advice stops being useful.
What I do with that is take a situation, reverse engineer it, and forecast what is likely to go wrong before it does, so it can be dealt with early in the acquisition rather than discovered in diligence.
Most of what is worth buying is not for sale
I originate off-market as well as on-market. That means picking up the phone to owners who have not decided to sell anything, rather than waiting for a teaser to land from a broker with fourteen other buyers on the list.
First impressions decide a great deal, so it starts with the first call to a target and with building a relationship from there. I have been the owner taking that call. I know how it lands when it is done badly.
What I do
Understand you
You get a search built around how you actually run, not a sector database. Before I look at a single business I learn what you are trying to build and how you operate, close enough to work as part of your team. The acquisition criteria are written down and agreed, and your case to a seller is made before the first call, not improvised on it.
Find it
You see businesses no broker will show you. Five routes run at once: sell-side brokers, food and drink advisers I have worked with, the sector community, my own pipeline from seven years of buy-side conversations, and cold approaches to owners who have never thought about selling. The one worth buying is often not the one you went looking for.
Represent you
The seller meets a buyer worth dealing with, and nothing in the process is left for you to chase. I make the approach and take the early conversations, with you or on your behalf. Only once the figures show the opportunity is real do I arrange a site visit, because how an operation actually runs is not in the accounts. Throughout, I run the paperwork: non-disclosure agreements issued and tracked, access arranged, versions controlled, all held in one place.
Assess it
You learn what the accounts do not tell you, before you pay for it. The information request goes out from me, in the right order. Then I assess what comes back and look for what is missing: the biggest customer with no contract, stock sitting since last summer, capex put off three years running. I write the follow-ups and sit in the meeting when they are answered.
The offer
An offer you can fund, and a price you can defend. Funding is checked before a number goes anywhere; I have raised £12m of acquisition finance through tier one and challenger banks. Then the non-binding offer and its structure, and heads of terms that catch every material point. It is rarely one attempt. Offers are rewritten and re-argued until both sides align, and the search keeps running until they do.
Heads of terms to completion
Terms will move between heads and completion. They should move for a reason, with a number behind them, not because one side wore the other down. Due diligence run to a timetable alongside your advisers, exclusivity extended before it lapses, and open points closed before signing. If the business needs someone to run it, that appointment is made before completion. If diligence turns up a deal breaker, or the seller will not extend, you walk and the search starts again.
The first thirty days
Nothing forgotten once the money moves. The checklist of what has to happen in the weeks after completion, from the thirty-day stamp duty deadline to the bank mandates, written before you own the company. I have done this after my own acquisitions, and I know what gets missed.
Three mandates at a time
Buy-side work is not a volume business and I do not run it as one. I take three mandates at once, and I do the work myself. Nothing is handed to an associate you have never met. Targets turning over £1m to £50m.
What I do not do
I do not write your business plan or run your executive search. I will tell you whether each of them is good enough, and introduce the people who do them for a living. I do not act for both sides of a deal. Ever. I am not paid more because you pay more.
Food and drink only
Food and drink manufacturing and wholesale. I do not take mandates outside the sector.
That is not positioning. I have bought in this sector, run businesses in it, and been through its cycles.
How I am paid
A retainer, plus a success fee on completion, both fixed in writing before any work starts.
The retainer covers a fraction of the hours a mandate takes, and most of those hours you never see: the approaches that go nowhere, the businesses ruled out before you ever hear their names, the second and third read of a set of accounts. I do not ration that work to the size of the retainer.
So the retainer is not what pays me. It is what makes telling you to walk away affordable, because on a pure success fee I am only paid if you buy, which is the wrong incentive at exactly the moment the right answer is no.
The line between the two sides
The other half of what I do is work with owners on their own exits, and that side is charged differently and deliberately so. Nothing I am paid there depends on the business being sold, to me or to anyone else. The two sides never touch.
And I will never act for a buyer of a business that has been through Three Years Out. There is no time limit on that and no fee that changes it. I would be holding that owner's figures and the weaknesses the work helped them find, and no amount of disclosure makes that acceptable.
