01Invest
What we buy, and on what basis.
The business as it stands, and what it could be worth as part of something larger.
Invest in practice
Most owners have been told what their business is worth. Fewer have been asked the question that decides whether the sale completes at all: what happens to customers, staff and cash in the weeks after it does.
We underwrite the business that exists today, not the one a transformation plan imagines. What already generates the earnings, what would break if it were changed, and what the business can fund by itself. The operating plan is agreed before completion, not discovered after it.
Then we underwrite the second question, which most buyers never ask: what the business could be worth as part of something larger. Shared systems and buying power, capability it could not carry by itself, routes to market it could not open alone, and the headroom it has not yet used.
We have sat on both sides of that assessment. We have bought businesses with our own capital at risk, and we have led the technology, operations and risk workstreams inside large transactions, where the things that go wrong afterwards are almost always the things nobody underwrote beforehand.
What we do as owner
You have built something that works. We buy it as it is, not as a plan imagines it, and we take on what happens to the people and customers afterwards.
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. That research covers the United States, which publishes data the UK does not, but the ownership demographics here are the same. McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, The Great Ownership Transfer, 26 February 2026
What must be true before we buy5
- 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
How we assess a business7
- 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
What the business could be worth inside a larger group5
- 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
What we build before completion5
- 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
Not selling? The same capability is available as an executive mandate. See Advisory