What a buyer will pay, and what they will take off.
For owners of £3m to £15m UK food and drink manufacturers and wholesalers, three to five years from an exit. It starts before the room, and leaves you with a plan for the three years after it.
Your value today, what you need, and the gap between them
The buyer's method, in a private room of four to six businesses
Within four weeks of the room: half a day on your numbers
Within ten working days: a dated three-year plan you run yourself
It is priced in before they open your accounts.
Most of what a buyer takes off your price is decided before they ever open your accounts, by how the business has been run for the last three years.
It will not be itemised for you. You get one number, with these already priced into it:
- One customer too big.
- Too much money tied up in stock and unpaid invoices.
- A business they are not sure runs without you.
Those are three of more than 100 risks a buyer looks for.
So do it first. Three years out, every one of them is still fixable, and you are the only person in the process with time to fix them. One of them you will not see coming at all: on the day you sell, the buyer decides how much of your own cash has to stay in the business.
Not a score. A Repair List.
Plenty of people will give your business a score for nothing. None of them will tell you what it costs you in pounds.
What you get here is different. Defect by defect: what a buyer will attack in your business, what they will take off the price for it, and what fixed actually looks like from the other side of the table. Knowing what is wrong is common. Knowing what it costs you is not, and only someone who has sat in the buyer's chair can tell you.
Behind it sits a list of nearly 200 priced defects, grouped into 139 risks a buyer looks for. Your figures go into it. What comes out is your own personalised Repair List, built on your numbers, not a category average.
Start at the other end
Before anything else, we work out what you need to walk away with. Not what the business might fetch. What has to be in your account after completion and after tax, to stop working and to look after the people you are responsible for.
That is the line in the sand. You can only improve upon that which is measured, so once the number exists we work backwards from it, through every stage between here and the sale, against what the business is worth today.
Most owners have never done this. They have a figure in their head that came out of a conversation with an accountant, and no idea whether the business can get them there.
How it runs
Before the room
You know your gap before you walk in. Send me the twenty-six items a buyer’s adviser would ask for, three years early, plus six confirmations from your accountant and a worksheet on what you need to bank.
You leave with:
- What the business is worth today
- What you need to walk away with
- The gap between them, in pounds
- The findings costing you most, each one priced, and what they add up to against that gap
The two days
Watch a buyer take a business apart, then learn to do it to yours. Day one, a buyer prices every defect in a case business in front of you. Day two is the method, worked on the same business and applied to yours on pages nobody else sees.
Covered:
- How buyers value, why deals die on funding, and what an offer’s shape tells you
- What to fix first, what takes three years, what is not worth fixing
- How buying another business works, if repair alone will not close your gap
- How the last year before a sale is run
Private session
Every repair on your business, priced and put in order.
You leave with:
- Your full Repair List, every entry with its repair
- The order the work goes in, agreed with you
- What the business could be worth once it is done, with every assumption written down
- The data-gap report: what you could not produce, and what a buyer takes off for it
- Whether repair closes your gap, or you need to buy to close it
Your roadmap
A three-year plan you can start on Monday. Dated quarter by quarter, with a named owner against every item and a 90-day start.
You leave with:
- A one-page brief to hand whoever runs the work
- The pack to run your own reviews: agenda, minutes and KPI sheet
- A valuation model, a due diligence checklist and a heads of terms
- What to do when somebody calls
- A map of the buyers most likely to want your business
The Day One Guarantee
Stay to the end of day one. If by the close you do not believe this is worth what you paid, tell me before you leave the room and I will refund the fee in full, cover your hotel and travel, and you keep the valuation and the findings I gave you on our call.
And a second promise, this one with conditions
Complete the worksheet on what you need to walk away with, get your accounts to me by the cut-off, attend both days and do the private session. Do those four things, and if you do not leave with a roadmap you would actually run, I keep working with you one to one, through up to two revisions in the three months after your private session.
Everyone else in your exit gets paid when the deal completes. I do not.
My fee is fixed, agreed upfront, and identical whether you sell for £4m or £8m, or never sell at all.
No fee I earn, anywhere in my business, depends on your company being sold to anyone, ever.
I will never act for a buyer of a business that has been through this programme. Not now, and not in ten years. I would be holding your figures and the weaknesses this work helped you find, and there is no disclosure that makes that acceptable.
Who it is not for
This is for food and drink manufacturers and wholesalers turning over £3m to £15m. Not hospitality, not catering, and not other sectors.
If you are selling in the next twelve months, you are past the point where most of this pays for itself. If you have no intention of ever selling, you are welcome in the room, but it is not written for you.
The room, and the price
The fee covers one owner. Where a business has more than one shareholder, one additional shareholder may attend at £1,250, because a second shareholder needs a walk-away number of their own worked out and their own position modelled. That is additional work, not an additional chair.
Your finance director or managing director does not attend the room. They come in at the roadmap, where the work is handed over, and there is a one-page brief written for exactly that.
Invoiced, payable on receipt, by bank transfer or card.
