The continuity of your company
There comes a point when the question stops being how to grow the company and becomes what will happen to it. It can arrive because a partner wants out while you stay, because the children have another life, because everything you own sits inside a single company, or because of an investment it needs to make that you no longer feel like funding on your own. It is not a question about retiring. It is a question about the company, and most people who ask it have not yet decided anything.
Reasons for selling that we hear
- Succession with no successor. The company has someone to buy it and nobody to carry it on, and those are not the same thing.
- Wanting liquidity without giving up work. Taking out part of what is in the company without having to leave it or stop running it.
- One partner leaving while the other stays. You need to buy out his share, and to do it without stripping the company of capital or taking on the borrowing alone.
- Heirs who do not want to run it. They are fond of you, they respect what you built, and their lives are elsewhere.
- Concentrated risk in a single company. Thirty years of work are all in the same place, and no investment adviser would recommend that to a client.
- An investment cycle the owner does not want to fund. The company needs to take a step, the step takes money and years, and you have already done that arithmetic.
The paths open to you
Where there is no clear successor, there are usually five: hand the company to a family member; sell it to the people already running it; sell it to a competitor or a group in the sector; sell it to a financial buyer; or close it. Each has different consequences for the people who work there, for the name, and for you.
We are not going to argue for one here. The right decision turns on things only the owner knows — the age of the children, the strength of the team, how much appetite for work is left. It is better settled calmly, in advance, than in the middle of a negotiation.
What changes and what does not
Does not change
- The name
- The team
- The location
- The customers
- The way of working
Changes
- The capital
- Succession, resolved
- Support in purchasing
- Systems
- Recruitment
- Insurance
Your role after the sale
Most owners we talk to are not looking to disappear. After the first few years there are three doors, and you choose: carry on running the company; join us in finding and settling the next ones; or take the time to bring your successor through properly. If none of those appeal, a seat as adviser is yours for as long as you want it. What does not happen is someone deciding, on a date fixed in advance, that there is no longer room for you.
- Stay
- Step back slowly
- Leave now
What we look for
Size, trade and geography, in numbers, and the situations we hear: see what we look for.
None of this asks you for a decision, and we do not need an answer now. When you want to think yours through out loud, telephone: nobody here is paid a commission for persuading you of anything.