01Invest
How we underwrite an investment.
McKinsey found that 92% of small business exits happen through closure and only 5% are sales, not because the businesses lack value but because the route to a buyer is limited, opaque or expensive. The research covers the United States, which publishes data the UK does not, although ownership demographics in the UK are comparable.
McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, The Great Ownership Transfer, 26 February 2026
Invest in practice
We assess the business as it stands and what it could be worth as part of something larger.
Most owners have been told what their business is worth. Fewer have been asked what happens to customers, staff and cash in the weeks after completion. That question decides whether a sale completes at all.
The business today
We underwrite the business that exists today, not the one a transformation plan imagines. We establish what generates the earnings, what would break if it were changed and what the business can fund itself. The operating plan is agreed before completion, not discovered after it.
Worth inside a larger group
We then assess what the business could be worth as part of a larger group, a question most buyers never ask. That value comes from shared systems and buying power, capability it could not carry alone, new routes to market and headroom it has not yet used.
Our experience
We have been on both sides of that assessment. We have acquired and owned businesses as principal and led the technology, operations and risk workstreams in large transactions. What goes wrong after completion is almost always what was not underwritten before it.
What we do as owner
We acquire established businesses as they are and take responsibility for their people and customers after completion.
- Sustainable earnings and reliable cash conversion
- Customers who would stay under new ownership
- Customer and supplier concentration understood
- Founder dependency identified and reducible
- A financing case the business can service as it stands
- Acquisition screening and investment thesis
- Commercial and operational diligence
- Technology, data and cyber diligence
- Management assessment and capability gaps
- Operational and commercial inputs to earnings quality and maintainable EBITDA
- Working capital, maintenance and growth capex
- Downside case and sensitivity
- Shared systems and reporting it would otherwise build alone
- Buying power and supplier terms at greater scale
- Finance and technology capability it could not carry by itself
- Routes to market it could not open alone
- Digitisation and automation not yet done, priced as upside rather than value paid for
- Value-creation thesis and priorities
- What must be preserved, in writing
- Day One plan and decision rights
- Financing-case inputs and lender pack support
- The intended route to realising value, and what would make it achievable
For owners who are not seeking a sale, the same capability is available as an executive mandate through Advisory.