How a company will come in
It will begin with a private conversation. If it makes sense, we put an indicative value in writing early, before asking the owner for weeks of his time. The final price starts from that value, is adjusted for cash and debt at completion, and moves away from it only if diligence shows a company different from the one described to us.
The path, step by step, is in Our process.
What stays
When we complete, the team, the customers and the location stay. Little changes in the first year: first we learn how the company works. Then we share with the group what helps it, such as purchasing, systems and training technicians, at each company’s own pace. The relationship with customers stays with the people who built it.
- The team
- The customers
- The location
What the group shares
The centre will be small. It will put capital where the company on its own could not put it: the owner’s exit, a van, a workshop, a piece of equipment, a contract that requires a bank guarantee. It will negotiate at group scale the things that are expensive to negotiate alone, purchasing, insurance, financing and systems, and whatever is saved counts in the results of the company that generated it. And it will help with what nobody likes doing alone, above all finding, training and keeping technicians. All of this comes in gradually, and only where it helps the company. As the group grows, the companies in the same region will come to share a common structure for estimating and planning the crews’ work, and each company goes on answering for its customers and its results.
Will do
- Capital
- Succession
- Purchasing
- Systems
- Recruitment
- Insurance
- Financing
Will never do
- Swap out the team
- Break the company up
- Buy to resell
We do not buy to sell. The business joins a group of companies we intend to keep, and whatever we promise you about the years after, we are the ones who will still be there to keep it.
Who will run the company after the sale
We answer for the company from the first day. The owner stays with us through the transition, usually two to three years, to pass on what he knows to the people who stay, and the terms of that period are written down before completion.
The owner’s role after the transition is set out in The continuity of your company.
Our job in those years is to prepare, with the people already there, whoever runs the company next. Wherever possible it will be someone from inside, whom the team and the customers already know. Where that person does not exist, finding them is our job, before the owner leaves. What will stay with us will be set down in writing: approving the year’s plan and the larger investments, deciding what happens to the money the company generates, and choosing who runs it. In the first year we will be there a great deal, and one of us may take on executive management alongside the owner. In the years that follow, less.