Buy the mispricing. Fix the reason for it.
Our strategy is narrow on purpose. One sector, one type of situation, one repeatable playbook — applied often enough that the platform underneath it becomes the real asset.
Small businesses in this sector are priced by their problems, not their potential.
A recruitment or training business doing a few million in revenue with a tired owner, one dominant client and no management information is genuinely hard to sell. There is no queue of trade buyers, private equity will not look at the ticket size, and the price reflects that.
We think that discount is larger than the underlying risk justifies — provided the buyer can actually fix the conditions creating it. That is a very different proposition from buying a good business cheaply. We are buying a fixable business cheaply, and the return depends on our ability to do the fixing.
So we underwrite our own execution, not a market rerating. If the improvement plan does not work, the deal does not work — which is precisely why we only buy in a sector where we already know what the plan is.
The eight conditions that create a discount
When we see a business trading below what its client base and revenue should justify, it is nearly always one or more of these.
Owner dependency
The founder is the top biller, the credit controller and the relationship. Nothing survives their absence.
Sub-scale overhead
A full back office carried by a business too small to absorb it. Fixed cost eats the margin.
Client concentration
One or two accounts dominate revenue, so pricing power is nil and risk is priced in hard.
Undermanaged pricing
Rates set years ago and never revisited. Discounts granted informally and never withdrawn.
No usable data
No view of margin by desk, client or consultant — so bad revenue is subsidised by good revenue, invisibly.
Deferred investment
Ageing systems, manual processes, unautomated compliance. Capex postponed until the business is for sale.
No second tier
No management layer beneath the owner, so there is nobody to hand it to and no career path to retain talent.
Broken succession
An MBO that cannot be funded, a family exit with no candidate, or a parent group that has lost interest.
What we actually change, and where the margin comes from
We run the same programme in every acquisition. The sequence matters more than the ambition — cash and confidence first, growth later.
| Lever | What we change | Where the margin comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Overhead consolidation | Finance, payroll, credit control, compliance and IT move to the group platform. | Duplicated fixed cost is removed; the remaining cost is spread across more revenue. |
| Pricing discipline | Every rate card, margin floor and legacy discount is reviewed and reset with authority levels. | Gross margin per placement or per learner rises without any increase in volume. |
| Desk and portfolio mix | Reporting by desk, client and consultant; loss-making activity closed or repriced. | Capacity is redeployed from low-margin work to proven high-margin work. |
| Owner de-risking | Relationships, pipeline and process documented and transferred; a second tier appointed. | Removes the discount attached to key-person risk and makes the business saleable. |
| Demand generation | Central data, market intelligence and outbound capability replace ad-hoc business development. | New client acquisition becomes a repeatable process rather than a function of one person's effort. |
| Working capital | Billing cycles, terms, invoice discounting and collections tightened and centrally managed. | Cash conversion improves, which funds the next acquisition without new outside capital. |
| Cross-referral | Clients of one group company introduced to the services of another. | Revenue per client rises at close to zero incremental acquisition cost. |
| Talent and retention | Career structure, training and incentive design aligned to group standards. | Lower attrition and faster ramp-up; productivity per head rises. |
We are buying to own, with no fixed exit clock
We are not running a fund with a ten-year life and a pressing need to return capital, so we are not obliged to sell a business at a moment that suits a timetable rather than the company.
That changes the decisions we make after completion. We can invest in systems that pay back over years, keep a brand where the brand still has value, and let a business grow into the group rather than be stripped into it.
It also changes what we can offer a seller. Where an owner wants to stay involved — commercially, part-time, or simply as a name on the door for a transition period — we can structure for that instead of against it.
Stabilise and integrate
Protect cash and clients, migrate the back office, install reporting, and settle the team. We deliberately avoid growth initiatives until the foundations are reliable.
Reprice and refocus
With real margin data available, pricing and desk mix are corrected and the second tier of management is built or recruited.
Grow and cross-sell
Central demand generation, cross-referral across the group, and selective bolt-ons that strengthen the same customer relationships.
Compound
Cash generated funds the next acquisition. The platform absorbs it faster than the last one, because the work has already been done once.
The strategy has real failure modes, and we treat them as such
Buy-and-build goes wrong in predictable ways. Naming them is how we avoid them.
Integrating faster than the platform can absorb
The most common failure is buying the next business before the last one is genuinely integrated. We pace acquisitions against integration capacity, not against available cash.
Cutting the wrong cost
Back-office duplication is cost. Client-facing capability usually is not. Confusing the two destroys the revenue that justified the purchase.
Losing the people who were the value
In a people business, the asset can resign. Retention planning happens before completion, not after the first resignation.
Over-gearing a cyclical sector
Recruitment revenue moves with the economy. Debt that is survivable in a good year is not necessarily survivable in a bad one, so we size it for the latter.
See whether your business fits what we buy.
Our acquisition criteria are published in full, including what we will not look at.