Highly profitable audit firm based in central London looking for a sale due to forthcoming retirement of owner. £1.28 million turnover from established clients, team of 10 staff including experienced & qualified auditors. Limited company structure, share sale sought. Offers invited. To express an interest in this firm, please reply to this email, give us a ring, or register as a buyer on our website & quote the reference number Ref 100352.
Charity Donations Wanted – Deadline 1st May 2024
Jonathan Fagan Business Brokers and Ten Percent Financial Recruitment donate 10% of annual net profits to charity via the Ten Percent Foundation, a charitable trust set up to distribute monies to charities in the UK and Africa. We have been doing this for over 20 years and by way of example in 2023 our charitable donation from our group of companies was £30,290.76. The Foundation never incurs any administration costs (other than bank charges) – all monies are distributed to charities.
Suggest a charity
We would love to hear of your nominations for worthy causes we can donate to. To suggest a charity please email Jonathan Fagan at jf@jonathanfagan.co.uk with the name of the charity, anything you think we would like to know about it and any experiences you may have had of the charity’s work. A lot of the charities like to know who nominated them, and if you are happy for us to release this to them and/or for us to use your name in any publicity related to the donation, please let us know. NB: please feel free to nominate charities that have received donations from us in the past. We love staying involved, but most charities think our donations are a one-off when in fact we do this every year.
Funding criteria
The trustees of the Ten-Percent Foundation are particularly interested in the following types of charity or worthy cause:
Charities that deal with poverty and the effects of poverty in the UK, support for stammering and in particular children affected by speech impediments, support for people who have Parkinsons, children with heart conditions, support for people who have had a stroke, charities working with ex-offenders, charities with links to the legal profession, charities dealing with victims (and perpetrators of) domestic violence and charities dealing with youth work in areas particularly affected by poverty.
Why do we donate?
We set up our companies over 20 years ago with the aim of being as socially responsible and ethical as possible in everything we did. As part of this we decided that a percentage of our profits should always be earmarked for charitable work and set the rate at ten percent. A sudden burst of inspiration meant we called ourselves the Ten Percent Group.
Our trustees go through each nomination to ensure the charity falls within our criteria for donations. The trustees also call each charity where possible to discuss potential funding requirements. We always check the charity accounts as well. We have a strict list of criteria in relation our donating which is available on the Ten Percent Foundation website. Donations tend to be within the range of £500-£2000 per charity per year, although in the past we have supported charities over a period of 5 years with donations going towards specific ongoing projects.
If you have any questions about the work of the Ten Percent Foundation, please visit our website at https://www.tenpercentfoundation.org
Overseas Investor Looking to Invest Into UK Accountancy Firm – Ref 500181
We have a very well regarded accountancy business (with a set of strong philanthropic principles) based in Australia and looking to buy into an accountancy practice in the UK. Their ideal target would be a practice with 3-5 accountants plus support staff, and/or a turnover of between £350k and £1.5 million. They will consider smaller companies as well. They will be looking to purchase a 51% stake in a company, and expect the owners to remain involved for the foreseeable future. The current owners will get the benefit of the future expansion as the buyers put extensive resources and business through the company and dramatically grow.
Their target is to be a top 30 accounting practice within 5 years with further acquistions planned in Europe and the USA. The investor is a top 100 accountancy practice, with over 16,000 clients and c100 employees. Their most recent turnover was c£5 million. The company have a strong ethos in value-based work. They are linked to a charitable foundation set up by their founders and would seek to make the same commitments in the UK. This is the ideal opportunity for anyone who wants to grow their business, but lacks the finances to push forward , as well as benefit from the work a company like this can introduce. They are looking for the right fit – same principles and ethos required. Interested? Please contact us in confidence via our website or by replying to this email.
Should I tell my staff I am selling my business?
No, absolutely not. We come across this question very often, and there are a whole host of different arguments for and against informing the staff of your future plans, but the short answer, as well as the long answer, is telling your staff about plans to sell a business is a bad idea, both from a business perspective and a moral perspective.
The business perspective
If you tell your staff you are considering a sale or disposal of your business and you are looking to retire or move on to other things, I can guarantee that some of your staff, if not all of them, will immediately start looking around for other jobs.
I can tell you this because not only do we undertake business brokerage services, but we are also recruitment consultants and we often see unsettled staff registering with us in clusters around firms. They may of course not tell you this, and be very supportive of your plans for disposal. You may get them involved in meetings with the potential buyers so they are comfortable with the purchasers coming in, and they may well pay lip service to this and be very helpful, but the reality will be that at the same time they will also be looking around for other work and may well have left by the time your new buyers come in at a later date.
So, from a business perspective, if you inform your staff, regardless of their length of service, you may well be damaging your own business, because some or all of these staff will be looking around for other work in the short term. Selling a business is essentially selling a functioning team of staff in most cases, and you cannot have a functioning team of staff if they have all left or they are looking around for other work.
Although recruitment can be very easy at certain times in the economic cycle of boom and bust, there are times when it is nothing short of a nightmare to replace staff who are departing.
Moral perspective
Quite often, owners of firms will tell us that they feel a moral obligation to inform their staff of their plans, because it’s not fair to just one day announce they are leaving and someone else is coming in. This is surely unfair they say, and they have a duty to their staff to inform them of their plans to sell.
We would argue against this on the basis that if you feel a moral obligation to tell your staff, do you also feel a moral obligation to cause them severe amounts of distress and uncertainty in their lives? Your members of staff may be dependent on you for their income to pay their mortgages and bills, and if you start telling them of plans to sell or leave, and affect their own circumstances going forwards, then you are essentially unnecessarily giving them huge amounts of stress to cope with that they did not necessarily need to have. If you had simply sold your practice and then informed them that things were about to change, they would have no uncertainty at all up to that point. This point goes back into the business perspective side of things, in that you are selling a business, and this is a business decision, not a personal decision. Your members of staff are also working, because this is their business, and they undertake the work in order to feed themselves and their families.
Example
A quick anecdotal example of a firm where the partners felt the need to notify the staff was a firm in the south west, who rang me up out of the blue one day to ask for our advice in relation to a deal they were doing. The owner explained that he had started to negotiate a deal and felt obliged to notify one of his key members of staff, so she was aware of what was happening. This key member of staff was the supervisor for a department. When they heard about the owner’s plans, they immediately asked for a pay rise. When this was not forthcoming, they submitted their resignation.
This meant that when it came to the sale prospects, the buyer no longer had that senior staff member in the firm, and if they had gone ahead with the purchase they would have needed to immediately recruit someone. If the seller had simply got to the date of the deal, signed the contract, and then notified his staff, then there would have been no issue for them. The deal would have gone through, and whether or not the member of staff had tried the salary rise out at that point or had simply left, would not be a matter for the seller and more a matter for the buyer.
Harsh?
You may think this is a little bit of a harsh position, but at the end of the day, when it comes to selling the business, you cannot be responsible for what happens after you sell the business, and it is for the buyer to accept the risk that members of staff could leave at any time, and to work accordingly to avoid this. So, in summary we definitely think it is not a good idea to tell your staff of any plans to sell your business. They are, after all, the service you are looking to sell, and they do not need to necessarily know of your own personal circumstances.
Thinking about selling? Get in touch for a confidential chat – 0800 246 5001 or visit www.jonathanfagan.co.uk
Selection of current buyers registered with us:
| ▪ | Australian firm looking to invest into the UK and acquire accountancy practices. |
| ▪ | ACA Accountant looking to establish a partnership with a former colleague and able to spend c£800k to £1.5 million on GRF. |
| ▪ | Accountant looking to purchase a practice up to £250k in value – Kent and surrounding areas ideal. |
| ▪ | Industry accountants looking to purchase their own firm. |
| ▪ | Accountant looking to purchase firms in the Dorset area. Poole ideally. £70k-£200k available. |
| ▪ | Accountancy firm looking to acquire a small accounting practice with a good block of recurring fees, ideally with at least 50% limited company clients. £100-250k range. |
| ▪ | Accountants looking to purchase payroll fees – spending up to £50k. Any location. |
| ▪ | New Zealand based accountancy business interested in buying blocks of fees in the UK. 100% online so geographic location is not relevant. ideally looking for blocks with a high proportion of Xero clients |
| ▪ | Accountant looking to set up own practice in South Wales and wanting to acquire client lists. |
| ▪ | Accountant looking to purchase client blocks of up to £500k in value. |
| ▪ | Accountancy firm looking to buy small accountancy practices in the North West – payroll only clients and businesses looked at. |
| ▪ | Accountancy firm looking to acquire accountancy firms – 9 in total – £100-£500k per practice, Ireland, Channel Islands, Isle of Man plus anywhere in the UK. Firm expanding – £3 million turnover. |
| ▪ | North London accountancy and tax firm looking to acquire a local firm with fees up to c£370k. Will also consider a reverse buy-out. |
| ▪ | Kent based accountant looking to purchase a firm up to £300k. ACCA qualified. |
| ▪ | Accountant looking for firms to buy in East and North London. |
| ▪ | Bookkeeping company with £500k turnover looking for acquisitions to expand. |
| ▪ | Accountancy practice with offices in North Wales and Camarthenshire. Looking to acquire new Welsh accountancy firms. |
| ▪ | India based. Looking to acquire UK accountancy practice |
| ▪ | Looking to merge local South Wales firms with their practice. £1 million turnover firm in Cardiff. |
| ▪ | Looking to purchase a Kent firm. |
| ▪ | Looking to buy a Greater London firm. |
List your firm or fee block for sale – click here
Thinking of Selling Your Firm or Fee Block?
Now is an extremely good time to consider the sale of your firm. We get at least 15 enquiries per accountancy, tax & audit practice listing and as a guide it is rare for a firm turning over less than £750k to remain for sale longer than four weeks.
We offer three levels of service (Bronze, Gold and Platinum). You can list your firm for sale or fee blocks and we assist with valuations, exit strategies, future proof planning, negotiations, due diligence, heads of terms & BPA/SPA drafting. We will usually have an extensive list of interested buyers for you to consider within 48 hours (we have a database of over 300 accountancy firms and accountants looking to purchase).
We do not charge sale fees and neither do we tie you in to using us. Our company has over 20 years’ experience in buying/selling/merging law firms and accountancy practices. We also provide retirement advice and valuation services, as well as sourcing funding for purchases.
Please visit Jonathan Fagan Law & Accountancy Firm Business Brokers for further details – https://www.jonathanfagan.co.uk
