Why 80% of Businesses Don’t Sell – And How Yours Can, with Kevin Harrington

Welcome, Kevin. How are you this week?

Yeah, very well, Darryl. Thanks. It’s been a good week. It’s been speaking to lots of interesting people. Some good things. Yeah, it’s been a good week.

Good to hear. Hey, what I wanted to explore with you on this week’s episode is had some interesting conversations on LinkedIn this week, specifically related to why some businesses sell and that stat that gets thrown around the place all the time around, hey, 80 % of businesses don’t sell. Someone asked me to basically dig into that a little more. So, I thought that might be a good conversation worth having with you here today.

Yes, indeed. Where should we start on this one? Because it is a good one.

Well, let’s start with look, it’s that classic stat you get, see thrown around all the time. And maybe it’s just where I’m snooping around in the dark holes of LinkedIn. But I see it lot people are throwing around. And that is that of all the small to medium business owners, all the businesses that go to market, most of them fail to get a deal, 80 % fail to get a deal. So where does that stat come from? I thought I’d dig it up and it comes from the IBBA, which is the International Business Brokers Association. And they did some research, I think two or three years ago now. And there’s no reason to believe that the research doesn’t apply to the UK as well. And it’s near enough that 80 % of businesses don’t sell. But I think it’s worth digging into that stat a little bit, Kevin, and going, well, 80 % of… what is a business in this this metric? What is a business that goes to market? So let’s have a look at the stats of the businesses and let’s see if we can’t make up some of our own our own results or apply this this rationale, this logic to the UK market. So. How many businesses in the UK are privately held? Have you got any information around that that off the top of your head?

Yeah, so this is an interesting one, isn’t it? Because there are businesses that are not limited companies and there are businesses that are partnerships and those don’t tend to get caught up in the data that we’ve got easy access to. But they are the minority of companies. in the UK, there’s nearly, well, there’s 5.7 million businesses in the UK. That sounds like.Yeah, half the people in the street must have their own company, doesn’t it? Because it’s a huge number.

It’s a massive number.

Yeah, and big companies, 250 plus employees is 8,250. And so generally for our business, when we’re looking at SMEs, those big companies would be excluded. And many of those end up being PLCs as well. And obviously, they sell themselves in a different way because their shares are publicly traded, etc.

Yep. So, we can exclude those.

Yeah, absolutely exclude those. Then so then there’s two key groups here. There’s naught to 49 employees, which is 5.45 million businesses. We’ll come back that in a minute because it’s a bit of a misleading number.

Five and a half million businesses in the UK have zero to 49 employees. Is that what you said? Okay, that’s a massive number. Yep.

Yep, that’s the number. Yeah, we’ll come back to that one and make some sense of it in a second. Then there’s the sort of the middle range businesses in SMEs, which are really important in the UK economy. That’s 10 to 49 employees, and that’s 219,895. So, 220,000 businesses, very important businesses. And then there’s the

It’s only a small dent in the five and a half million though.

Yeah, we’ll come back to that. Then the other group we’ve not mentioned yet is 50 to 249 employees. So, they’re big turnover businesses, typically over 5 million revenue, and that’s 37,800. So those are the businesses we’re looking at. let’s, from practical point of view, let’s deal with that big number we started off with.

Yeah, so rounding up, there’s 300,000 businesses in that established business where they’ve got a number of employees, they’ve got solid, reliable, potentially or regular revenue and they’re established business 300,000. It’s a privately held businesses.

Yes, yeah, in round numbers. The big number I mentioned before the 5.45 million businesses and all to 49 employees, if you take out the companies that are holding companies, shell companies, non-trading companies, whatever just dormant companies.

Trustees.

So, no employees, very often. And just talk about the one to nine employees, it comes down from five, nearly five and half million to 1.16 million. So, they’re the actively trading small businesses in the UK, 1.16 million. So, in our business, we’re mostly talking about people that are 10 to 249 employees, which gives us a target range of 260,000 businesses, which is a lot of businesses. It is what makes the UK economy go around.

These are the ones, and we won’t resist the urge to to make any political comments around that at the moment. It will just look at the facts and what’s really going on. Yeah. And what’s going on in these business owners’ minds from day to day. there’s two hundred and sixty thousand of them that we’re potentially talking to in this podcast.

Okay, so we’ve got 260,000 of them and we’re saying that if that’s the bracket we’re talking to of those, they’re all, you know, they’re all of a size where the owners want to exit them one day. And some of them will want to hand it down to their family. Some of them will want to sell it to their employees and go through an EOT route. And there’s an option. Some of them will want to continue to grow the business and actually become one of those businesses that are listed.

Some of them will merge with others and grow and two businesses will become one and perhaps get some help from a PE company who will acquire them and merge them and pull a number of those businesses, similar businesses together into one outfit. There’s a number of exit options there and a number of them will just have to close the doors because they can’t sell.

Yeah. The list lay over the IBBA number you had their earlier than Darryl and so out the 260,000 businesses in the UK we’re talking about the 10 to 249 employees in total. It means that rather hideous number 206,000 of those statistically will not sell. And then it does also tell us that just over 51,000, 51 and a half thousands of them will sell statistically, but not necessarily on terms that are favorable to them. might include earn outs, it might be for a number that’s not the one that the owner was looking to get when they sold the business. this is when you consider the amount of blood, sweat and tears that owners have put into their business over the years they’ve been running it from the get-go.

That is, I mean, it’s criminal that people, so many people are exiting their businesses with no payout at the end from it. I mean, some of them, it’s kind of intentional because they’ve never updated their business and its sort of faded away, but most people, it’s because the businesses can’t sell, they’re not saleable.

Yeah. And I don’t think we can just throw a blanket over those and just go, hey, look, all of the ones that won’t sell are those ones that are at the lower end. There’s going to be some that are looking like quite established businesses that still won’t sell. Or as you touched on, they might attract a deal, but the terms, the deal terms will be pretty unfavorable because, well, why? Why would they, you know, they get unfavorable because they’re just too dependent or they’re just too risky. We’ve discussed that in a previous podcast. But it might be a good opportunity to go, well, okay, so we don’t want to say, you know, I think it’s fairly true that a lot of those that won’t sell will be smaller ones where they are really lifestyle businesses where the owners, well, no, think we can even rule out lifestyle businesses because if they’re lifestyle business, they’re not even going to try and sell them.

So, we’re only talking about the ones that go to market that try to sell. So, the ones that try to sell, a lot of them are going to be at the smaller end where they fail. Do you think, here’s a question for you, Kevin. Do you think there’s a business, do you think a business owner can feel confident and go, hey, look, I’ve passed this threshold where I’ve got my business to a certain size, so therefore it’s definitely sellable?

Do you think is that something that business owners can give themselves comfort with or is that just what they want to hear?

Yes, yes, I think they can give themselves comfort for it. There’s a danger of it being false comfort though being a little bit delusional occasionally. But let’s see, elaborate on this. If a business gets to, for example, the 50-employee number, which without knowing more about any particular business, if it’s got 50 employees, it’s probably delivering about 5 million revenues.

Yeah.

If it’s that number, it’s almost undoubtedly got a hierarchical management structure where there’s the owner, owners of the business, and then some sort of leadership or management team, five people, six people, whatever, that are charged with running different disciplines, know, the finance, the sales, the manufacturing, whatever. And as such, that is de-risking the business when someone wants to buy it because it’s not as owner dependent because of that structure. The reality is that you have to watch out that it still doesn’t automatically mean it’s saleable, but it’s dramatically more attractive to a purchaser because it’s got some substance, it’s got structure, and if I were to buy that business, the chances of me being able to carry on the revenue, have sustainable revenues and profitability out of it much higher than if it was a 10-person company.

Yeah, so by the time they get to five million revenues, they’ve got 50 odd employees. They’ve got at least five people in management positions. Some of those people in management slash leadership positions will have grown up with the company and it’s the only leadership and management position they’ve ever held. So, you might be able to question the depth of their capability and their experience in managing. But if they’ve got 50 people in the business, they’ve probably also recruited into a couple of those management positions, people specifically to do their job. And they’ve got some experience from elsewhere. And you would like to think, generally speaking, that some of those people are in a position where they can challenge the owners, and they’ve closed the capability gap between themselves, and the owners compared to the managers and leaders that have grown up in the business as a rule of thumb.

Yes, yeah. And it is about having the established experience that you’ve gained in your business, keeping some of that skill as you grow. That makes common sense. But augmenting it, refreshing it with people that have worked for other businesses in the industry that can bring new ideas, alternative approaches, different contacts and so forth. And sometimes, when it gets to a certain size, you want one or two people that are from a different industry outside of your industry to say, well, you know, there’s more than one way of doing this and here’s an alternative that can make your business more effective, more efficient, more profitable and more fun. And you can afford to start doing that when you’re in the 50 to 249 employee range. And if you don’t do it, you are missing out on opportunities.

Okay, so if you’ve got your business to five mil, you can be fairly comfortable that you’ll get a deal there. All the other rules still apply around having to systemise your business and have documentation in place and have some good feedback and monitoring systems in place and structures and job descriptions and reliance on clients. All those other rules still apply, will create an overlay. But if you get to five mil, we’re saying you should be able to get a deal. Let’s go back a notch.

What about 1 mil? If you get to 1 mil, how confident can you be that you’re going to be able to achieve a deal?

I think people get to a stage when they’re around about 1 million where they have a sense for what they think the value of their business is. But that’s derived from conversations with people, with friends, people else in the industry, things have heard at conferences or whatever. And bearing in mind that at that level, the number of businesses that don’t sell in one to nine, 10 employees is nearly a million businesses that don’t sell. There’s a lot of people that had this notion that it would sell, and they’ve got it wrong. Now, what’s the difference between a saleable business with a million revenue and a business that doesn’t sell? Well, there are a number of things and if anyone says it’s one thing that it’s not helpful, there are a number of different reasons it can be.

You know, sometimes a rising business with 10 staff is they may have some intellectual property that’s highly attractive to someone else in the industry to make a strategic purchase of. And then you can get above the obvious value for it because the worth to the purchaser could be so much higher. If that business has been diligent in putting processes in place, it can demonstrate its value to a buyer much, much better.

And it is on the cusp, isn’t it, with 10 people, at that sort of level, it’s on the cusp of being a structured business rather than an owner with nine helpers. If it’s an owner with nine helpers, it’s really difficult to sell. But if it started to create some structure, and perhaps there’s some intellectual property, perhaps some of the customers are contracted or subscribed or whatever.

Exactly.

That can become an interesting and attractive business. But very big companies rarely buy very small companies. It’s too much effort to get hold of a million pounds worth of revenue. Putting two or three people on financial due diligence, technical due diligence, the accountants, the lawyers, just for a million revenue, most often is not that attractive. So perhaps it’s a trade sale to someone who’s three, four, five times your size.

Yeah. So, it’s worth looking at because we’ve talked before about our scalability rule of thumb, and we mentioned rules of thumb earlier. And that is every time you triple in size, you need to rebuild your platforms. So that’s a one person band at 100K revenue. Then they need new platforms and tools at 300. And then a mill is that next transition point or turning point and from one mill to three, et cetera.

So that one million inflection point is one where buyers would be looking and they’d be going, how long has the business been at a million revenue? Have they plateaued at a mill? Have they been hovering around that mark for a number of years or are they just scaling through it? And for businesses scaling through it, the owners will be appointing managers and leaders to, because that’s when they really, it’s that first point, because you’ve got about 10 people and teams of 10 people are really at the max. But if the business has been hovering at a mill, it suggests that the owners haven’t figured out how to scale their business. haven’t figured out how to appoint a management team and maintain control of the business and overall direction. They probably micromanaging and getting involved. that suggests if they’re hovering around that for a number of years, that it is very much that hub and spoke model. Everything revolves around the owners.

All the decisions are made from their memory. Nothing is really documented. They’re telling people what to do, getting involved. And those sort of businesses struggle to recruit capable leadership people and people. You’ll always see a big gap in skills between the owner and the next layer in a business that’s been hovering at a mill for a number of years.

Yeah, it’s interesting when you were saying that I, a word came to mind, momentum. If you’re buying a business, you want to buy something with momentum. And here what I mean is it’s the scaling momentum. Why buy a business standing still? Because you’re probably, well, if you want to get more out of it, you’re going to have to spend some time, effort and money to get rid of that inertia, to create that scaling structure, that scaling attitude within the business that hasn’t been there for years. And when people are looking to buy a business, people go, well, why do they need to see five years of my numbers? Well, here’s why. Because if it’s just been standing still for five years, in reality, it’s probably been losing market share, taking in mind inflation, if it’s been standing still, is actually going backwards.

That’s why people want to see five years or three years of balance sheets and P &Ls and so forth so they can see what’s going on. If I’m buying a business, I want to buy something that’s going somewhere. So when I then put some effort into it, it’s multiplying the growth that’s already going on. And it’s easier to make it go faster than to get it moving from a standstill.

Yeah. So let’s spend a bit of time on the businesses where we have the most impact, where we do our best work, because, it’s our favorite topic. Those businesses that are really in that three to ten bracket. What a business that’s at three mill, because we talked a little bit earlier about a business that’s at five mill. Yeah, they’re to be able to get a deal in all likelihood. The terms may be questionable and that’s where we can have an impact. It’s going well.

If we’re going to help a business in that size, where we’re going to make the most difference is we’re going to improve the terms that they’re likely to be able to negotiate with the buyer. They’re going to be able to negotiate more favorable terms. They’re to be able to get a deal quicker and they’re going to be able to reduce the earn out. So let’s dig into what are some of the things that we’d be looking at in a business of that size, specifically where we’d make a difference.

And the first one that I’m going to throw on the table is you need a proper board structure, and a proper board set up. By the time you’re at three mil, you want your board to be functioning as a board. You don’t want the owners or the founders getting together at this stage and blending their board meetings with leadership meetings and operational meetings and just having all those business planning type of conversations, the conversations that are, you know, your operational interests of revenue and profit and staff issues. You need your board to be functioning as a proper board. They need to be looking at governance. They need to be looking at strategy. And, you know, they shouldn’t be looking. They should be having the meeting separate to the leadership meetings. And we don’t want those agendas blurred. So, the conversation should be around, you know, the direction of the business, the big plan, the mission, the purpose and ensuring governance and compliance. And we need to have minutes of meetings of those board meetings that are easily accessible and evidence that any actions from those minutes have been completed.

Like, yeah, I used to work for a division of a big global company listed on in New York and other markets and stuff like that. And it was interesting because our business was in this kind of scale sizes division we were in in the UK. And we had six directors. And we were very conscious of the challenges of operating strategically and operating efficiently and effectively.

So, the six of us used to have two different meetings. We used to board meetings where we sat down and talked about the strategy, the black stuff that we talk about and the green stuff around vision and culture and so forth. And we used to diligently focus on making sure we were maximising the impact of the business in the marketplace, doing the right things for the future, ensuring that off balance sheet risks were noted and all that sort of stuff, we were running a proper business. And then at another time, we the same six people would sit down and have an operations meeting. And it’s one of the hardest things for people to get into the habit of doing is to sit down and when there’s a when when something is going off the rails at an operational level, and you’ve got to have a board meeting, it’s so easy to try and go, let’s sort out the immediate problem. You can’t do that; you’ve got to stick to it.

Yeah.

And by doing that, meant that our strategy was evolving, it was developing, it was being communicated well. We were, by good board decisions, we were reducing risk and increasing opportunity. We were looking at acquisitions and takeovers that we could do and all sorts of things. That was great. That was pigeonholed. That was really important. That was our future. Day to day was the operations meeting and we became more efficient at doing that as well.

So yeah, you make a good point because the people are the same people, and they struggle to change their hats, and they just want to dig in and get the job done and make a difference and remove the problem or the bottleneck or whatever’s going on. They just want to fix the problem. So yeah, that takes a real discipline to separate. So one of the things we want at a three mil to 10 mil in that phase of building platforms is we want a board that’s functional.

I reckon one of the next things we want to look at is we want to make sure that a business by that stage has developed, they’ve transformed their accounting function into a proper finance function. They’ve probably, well no, they’ve definitely got access to a CFO type of person, CFO, finance director, level person, someone who’s got skills and experience from outside your business, whether they’re fractional or employed in your business, you’re now, you’re developing monthly and even weekly finance reports. You’ve got cash flow; you’re on top of your cash flow. You know exactly what’s happening with your cash flow. But you’ve got someone who’s using all of your financial data and projecting and monitoring and modeling forward rather than just be late compliance driven accounts.

Yes, and I think a measure that I set out to see that this is working is that leadership team knows the numbers without having to look them up. It’s that they are important. will be eight each manager in that leadership team and for their area of business should know the three or four key metrics, should know what the number is at least to a weekly level, depends on the type of business, sometimes it’s down to a daily level. And you want to finance function, managing the cash really well. It doesn’t matter, you sometimes we start managing the money, except with exceptional attention, when things are tough, we should be doing that when things are going really well. Money is a great resource. If we’ve got lots of it, how can we make better use of it? Can we use that for strategic growth?

Can we use that for an acquisition? Can we use that to develop a new product sector? And you need to know whether that’s a real free cash chunk of money that’s there, or is there a liability down the road where we need to keep it liquid and available. And if you’re not aware of that in that kind of mid-sized business, you can make the wrong decisions. It can appear like you’ve got the money, and you go in the wrong direction, and you need the cash suddenly.

One and one of the key measures that we produce in the Business Insights Report is that sustainable growth rate, which is a really important number for your strategic planning. Because if you’re planning to grow the business by 30 % a year, 50 % a year, and your sustainable growth rate is 25%, that means you’re going to need to fund that growth somehow. Because your sustainable growth rate is the amount you can grow based on your cash flow.

And and that’s what a finance person will be looking at. I’ll be monitoring what you can do with your numbers, what’s affordable, how they acquire, how they provide the funding for the growth, what leverage, what they can use your funds, your business strategically and sensibly and leverage what you’ve built so far. So, there’s one of the platforms you want in that that three to 10 million sort of bracket.

What else would you based on your background in marketing and being a marketing director, Kevin, at that three to 10, what level of marketing resource do you think we want established in the business?

A fun one. And it’s often becomes a big debate with other disciplines in a business. But when you’re getting to that size of business, it’s more important to start off understanding what the functions are within marketing. Because if you categorise it as something different, the amount of money you allocate to different departments varies. So, I mean, I’ve got a list I use of 50 different functions within marketing that are all things that have to happen in one way, shape or form, you have to be conscious of. But what drives those functions, what actually drives them is having a strategy in the first place. Where are you trying to get your business to? What budget is available? You need people, either internal or externally, to help you create things and spend that money wisely. And you need to be finding ways of establishing what return on investment is.

Marketing is a discipline that lets itself down occasionally by not allowing it to be reported easily. Marketing is what makes most businesses great. And it starts off by having a strategy that is in line with the vision of the business, you have a marketing strategy. And from that, your activities drop out of the bottom of that strategy. And I always like to say to SMEs that pretty much 80 % of that budget should be predetermined what you’re going to do with it through the year. The other 20 % should be probably kept aside just in case the business numbers aren’t as high as we thought they were going to be is the first thing because sometimes that can be an issue in mid-sized businesses. The other thing is that if things are all going well, it gives you that flexibility for tactical opportunities, tactical marketing opportunities that come up that might be good deals or just reacting to market changes and so forth.

Darryl Bates-Brownsword (29:07)
So to pull it together, think in that that three to 10 mill, if you really want to improve your sellability score, what and we can point people to how to take the sellability score in the show notes here. But I think by this stage, you really need a marketing machine and you need access to a marketing director level person. Again, fractional, the idea of a fractional resources has really grown over the last 20 years and.

The other big change, I think, over the last 20 years is the merging of marketing and sales. 20 years ago, marketing and sales really pre-internet or in the early stages of the internet, they’re really discrete and separate functions with the online world as it is now. I think those two functions have really merged and pulled together. So, it’s so important that they need to be working a whole lot closer together than they ever had.

But where am I getting to? I think we need a marketing machine, and we need that resource. We need the marketing strategy developed in-house rather than just outsourcing to an agency to fulfill that marketing role or function for us. We need the skills in-house because the way we access the marketplace, the way we design our strategies is a part of our valuation. Our ability to build those sources or those channels to market and leverage them and know the cost per acquisition per client, know the gestation period for a client in via any channel, knowing the return on investment we get through our marketing from any channel. By the time we’re in that three to 10 million bracket, we need to be all over that. And our marketing needs to be operating as a machine. Doesn’t mean we don’t use agencies to perform some of the tactical elements of marketing, but we need to own the marketing function in-house. And similarly, for, you are perhaps we’ve even got some sort of capacity function as well to manage the capacity and matching our ability to supply the talent to meet the demand generated by the marketing. Also have that in-house.

Yes, and you’re absolutely right. It’s the business must own its marketing strategy, and it does that by creating it itself. It’s always an interesting idea to get it challenged by people from outside, but a business must own it. Beyond that, it’s an exciting world we’re in now where things can be partnered, outsourced and so forth. I mean, we can spend time, and we do spend time talking to our clients around to what extent that can be internal and external. And the thing to ensure is that the people internally are really good value for money. That’s the measure. It’s so easy to staff up and go, well, there we go. And you get people twiddling their thumbs. And it’s where marketing ends up being called the coloring in department because people wonder what they do. But if you have a nice lean small team internally, that outsources to the people that do the 50 different functions I’m talking about when required, you can have the best in the UK or the best in the world working for you for short periods of time. a five-to-10-million-pound business can afford a 150,000 pound a year marketing director on a fractional basis. And how exciting is that to have someone with that clout and experience on a fractional basis to help that business grow from a marketing perspective.

Yeah, well, they’re just going to make sure that your market messaging is aligned to your strategy and it’s consistent and all of your marketing is aligned, which means that your message to the marketplace is not getting confused because it’s a different message all the time and it doesn’t seem consistent.

Yes.

Brilliant. Now, one of the other things is we’ve got a business of this size that we would stop, you know, impacts on its sellability is how many things, how much of your, your institutional knowledge, your business knowledge is retained in people’s heads and how much are you reliant on people who have worked their way up through your business over the years? They’re, they’ve been with your business for five, 10, 20 years, and they’ve got all of that knowledge in their heads. How much are you relying on that knowledge being in their head and reliant on that person being around and available to answer all the tricky questions. And how much of your business is now process driven? How much of your corporate knowledge, if you like, is now documented in a standard way of doing things, which means that every time that process or is performed, that it’s done in a reliable way. And you can now train people in that process. And you’ve got some sort of evidence via reporting and monitoring that it’s always being done the same way. So that’s the systems side of things we’re talking about is it needs to be clear and reliable by this stage.

Yeah, and we measure that key person dependency, key person and key person risk in our business insights report, don’t we? And it is very, very important. If one person were to disappear from the business and they’re going to cause a level of disruption and fragility in the ongoing business, that’s a danger that should be mitigated. And it’s mitigated by what you’re saying, Darryl, of getting processes and systems in place, sharing the knowledge, or actually just making sure more people know it. It’s a fairly easy thing to do, but it’s also fairly easy just to go, do you know what, there’s something more important for me to do this week and our technical director or whatever, they’ll still be here next week, it’s fine, we don’t need to do it just yet. We’ve seen businesses that have fallen apart because one person has disappeared through health reasons or they’ve been poached by a competitor or whatever, it can be avoided and it’s ridiculous to not avoid it.

So, let’s pull it all together, shall we? And wrap this episode up. We’ve talked about why some businesses don’t sell. And we’ve talked about the market stat that’s thrown around in the marketplace, that 80 % of businesses that go to market don’t sell. We’ve put a number, what was that number again? Of the number of businesses that applies to it. It’s really 260,000 businesses in the UK in that established marketplace that we’re talking about, is really the two million, I think it was, or the one to 50 employees, Kevin.

Yeah, that was the one to 49 years, but it’s just two employees, we’ve got 260,000 businesses, which means that that suggests that 200 odd thousands of those will fail to get a deal. We’ve talked about once you get to about five mil in revenue, you can pretty much count on a deal. It’s just the terms that that are going to the terms that you’re able to negotiate for the deal. And we talked about, hey, let’s talk about the businesses that we work mostly with. And that’s really that one 1 million plus businesses, the 1 to 50 employees, 10 to 50 employees. What you can do, and we drill down to some of the specific things at the various stages of businesses, what they would be looking for or what they need to put in place to improve their sellability score. And we’ll put the sellability score in the show notes.

That’s a good summary.

Beautiful. Hey, Kevin, let’s catch up again soon. We’ll talk again next week. I’m sure there’ll be some comments and feedback on this episode. Why didn’t we cover this? Why didn’t we cover that? But until next time, have a great week.

Yeah, thanks, Daryl.

About Kevin Harrington

Kevin Harrington- Succession Plus UK Partner

Having worked in technology, telecoms, consumer electronics, payments, media and publishing, Kevin has enjoyed an interesting career history that embraces product and services businesses at all stages of their journey.

Before joining Succession Plus he was CMO with The Panoply plc, a digitally native technology services company, founded in 2016, with the aim of identifying and acquiring best-of-breed specialist information technology and innovation consulting businesses. He joined The Panoply from Tungsten Network where he was Chief Commercial Officer.

Previous roles have included working with SMEs and large international businesses. Some highlights are Managing Director at the Emerging Payments Awards and the Prepaid Awards; Managing Director of Gx; Director of Sodexo Motivation Solutions; Global Marketing Director at BBC Worldwide; Product Group Marketing Manager with Sony UK.

His career started out in a completely different direction. His first two full-time roles were as a junior in an architect’s office and a civil engineering technician. Some of his drawings and designs were constructed and are still standing.

If you would like to learn more about how to start preparing your business, then you can get more information here: https://page.succession.plus/it-all-begins-with-insights-exit-insights

Get started by knowing how sellable your business is right now. Check out our Business Sellability Scorecard to find out.