How the group works

How a company will come in

A company will come into the group by the most boring route we know how to design, and that will be a choice and not an accident. It will begin with a private conversation, with no commitment on either side, in which we will listen more than we speak. If it makes sense on both sides, we will put in writing, early, what we believe the company is worth and on what terms, before we ask the owner for weeks of his time. Then we will ask for a short period to get to know the company properly, the accounts, the customers and the way the work is done, with as little disruption as honesty allows. If what we find confirms what we were told, we will complete at the price agreed. If it does not, we will say why, and we will say so early. What we will not do, in any circumstances, is take an owner all the way to the end only to find a different price for him there.

The path, step by step, is in Our process.

What will stay local

When we complete, the team stays, the location stays, and — in almost every case — the name stays. Your people keep their jobs and, in most cases, their managers. What changes on the first day is as little as we can manage.

• The name above the door
• The team
• Day-to-day management
• The customers
• The way of working

Most of what we acquire stays as we found it — the team, the location, the name above the door. We treat each business as an inheritance, not an asset.

What the centre will do

The centre will be small, and it will be small on purpose. It will do three things. 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 will stay with the company that generated it. And it will help with what nobody likes doing alone, above all finding, training and keeping technicians, which is the problem all of these companies have in common and the only one that is solved better together than separately. It will not set prices, it will not choose customers, it will not decide who is hired, and it will not put managers of ours above the people already there. The rule we will give ourselves is this: the centre exists only to do what the company could not do on its own, and everything it does will have to keep justifying itself to the people who receive it. The day it stops justifying itself, it stops being done.

• Capital
• Succession
• Purchasing
• Systems
• Recruitment
• Insurance
• Financing

What the centre will never do

• Move the registered office
• Change the brand
• Break the company up
• Swap out the team
• Resell

We do not sell. The business joins a small group of companies we intend to keep for good — 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

The people who built a business are usually the people best placed to run it. We do not install our own managers, and we do not run companies from a distance. We agree a clear direction and what good looks like, then leave operators to do their work.

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.

When the owner decides to step back, and on the day he chooses, whoever takes over the company will come, wherever possible, from inside it. We would rather spend a year or two preparing someone who is already there and already decides, with the owner still present, than bring in from outside a person nobody knows and the customers do not recognise. Where that person does not exist, finding them will be our job and not the owner’s, and it will be done before he leaves and not after. What will stay with us is little, and it 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. Everything else will belong to the people who work there. We will be present regularly, more in the first year than in the years that follow, and we will know we are doing our job well when they need us less and less.