There is a whole industry built around the assumption that if you want to sell a UK business, the first step is to instruct a broker and list it. Most sellers assume this is how it has to work. Most buyers assume this is where the deal flow lives. Both are wrong more often than they realise.
The best acquisitions, in our experience, almost never begin on a listing site. They begin with a direct conversation between an owner who has quietly been thinking about the next chapter, and a buyer who took the time to write to them personally. No auction. No shortlist. No twenty-page teaser with the company name blanked out.
There is nothing wrong with the broker route in principle. There are good brokers, and for some businesses a formal process is the right answer. But it is worth understanding what a listing changes, on both sides of the table, before defaulting to it.
What happens when a business goes on the market
The moment a business is listed, several things start to happen quickly. The seller pays a retainer, then a success fee that is often between four and eight percent of the deal value. The seller signs an exclusivity clause that stops them dealing directly with anyone else. A teaser document goes out to a mailing list of buyers, most of whom will never seriously bid. And a clock starts, because a business that has been on the market for too long looks stale.
For the buyer, listed businesses arrive already dressed for sale. The information pack has been polished. The numbers have been rebased. There will be five other bidders in the process by the time a first meeting happens, and any offer will be benchmarked against the highest of them. The relationship between buyer and seller begins as a competitive negotiation, not a conversation.
What a direct approach looks like instead
Our preference, wherever we can, is to reach out to a founder before any of this happens. A letter or an email that says who we are, what we buy, and why we would like to have a private conversation. No pressure. No timelines. If the owner is not thinking about selling, they say so and we thank them. If they are, we spend the next few months getting to know the business at their pace.
This is slower. It requires patience that most bidders in a formal process are not incentivised to have. But it produces a different kind of deal.
What both sides actually save
For the seller, no broker fee. On a four million pound transaction, that is £160,000 to £320,000 that stays with the family instead of the intermediary. There is no exclusivity clause. There is no auction dynamic pushing them to justify their business in a bidding matrix.
For the buyer, no premium paid to win a competitive process. No pressure to submit an offer against buyers with different intentions. Real access to the founder from the first meeting, rather than a broker gatekeeping every question.
Why it is not about avoiding a fair price
This is the part it is important to be honest about. A direct approach is not a way to pay less. Any decent acquirer arriving at a business off market will still price it against the same market comparables a broker would use. The savings from a direct process come out of the intermediary layer, not out of the seller's pocket.
What changes is the terms. In a direct deal, the shape of the transaction can be built around what actually works for both parties. Handover length. Vendor rollover. Deferred payments. Continued involvement for the outgoing owner if they want it. In a formal process, terms tend to snap to the standard shape, because that is what the timetable allows.
For sellers who might not want a process
If you have run a business for decades, the idea of putting it in a shop window for six months is often the reason you have not spoken to anybody yet. That is fair. There is another way. It starts with a conversation, at your pace, in confidence, with somebody whose plan is to run the business, not to auction it.
If that sounds more like the kind of exit you had quietly imagined, we would be glad to hear from you.
