Approach
What actually happens, from the first email to the year after completion.
Selling the company you built is not a transaction you have practised. Here is the whole sequence, written out, so you can see what you would be agreeing to at each point and where you can stop.
The whole process, on one line
Nothing irreversible happens early.
Most owners we speak to have told nobody. Not their staff, often not their children.
Every step is designed so that the first four cost you nothing, disclose nothing, and can be stopped without anyone knowing they happened.
Numbers do come into it, and sooner than most owners expect. Neither of us can judge whether this is a fit without them, so we will ask, and we will say why we are asking. What we will not do is approach your staff, your customers or your bank, or put your company on any list.
The sequence
Eight steps, and you control the pace of every one.
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A first conversation
A form, an email or a phone call. Nothing is written down beyond what you send. Most first conversations are about whether you want to do this at all, and many of them end there for two or three years.
No documents, no disclosure
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Mutual confidentiality
A short two-way confidentiality agreement, signed before any number is discussed. It binds us as much as you, and it is the point at which the names of the advisory board are disclosed to you.
One document, reversible
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The business, in outline
Three years of accounts, your current-year forecast, a customer concentration picture, and a conversation about how the company actually makes money. Enough for us to be honest about whether this is a fit, and no more.
Your accountant is usually enough
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An indicative range
A written valuation range with the reasoning shown, including what would move it up and what would move it down. If the range is not one you would accept, we say so plainly and you have lost a fortnight, not a year.
Non-binding, both ways
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Heads of terms
Price, structure, what you keep, what you stay for, and what happens to your people. This is the first document with real weight, and it is where you should have your own lawyer.
The decision point
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Diligence
Financial, legal and commercial, run to a fixed timetable that we publish to you at the start. We do not retrade the price after diligence unless something material and previously undisclosed emerges, and if it does we tell you what and why in writing.
Eight to twelve weeks, typically
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Completion, and the handover
The principal becomes full-time chief executive. You decide how the news reaches your staff and your customers, and in what order. Most owners stay on in some form for six to twelve months, though that is a choice and not a condition.
Your announcement, your sequence
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The years after
The company is run, not prepared for resale. Reinvestment, selective acquisitions of smaller businesses in the same trade, and where it fits, the Japan channel. There is no fund clock forcing a sale on a schedule.
Long term, and meant literally
Afterwards
What the company inherits.
A company of this size usually cannot afford the functions that decide whether it grows: someone who has raised capital, someone who has hired at scale, someone who has bought and integrated other businesses, and a route into a market it could not otherwise reach.
Those are the four seats on the advisory board. They are not a service we sell to anyone. They are what arrives with the ownership change.
Thirty years of judgement is the asset. It should not leave the building with you.