Fractional M&A Advisory

Whether you are an owner-managed business without any internal M&A function, or a growing business pursuing a buy-and-build strategy with a CFO already stretched across the day-to-day, the challenge is often the same. Transactions demand a combination of time and specialist expertise that is hard to sustain internally. Bandwidth and deep M&A experience are two problems we can solve at the same time.

As your Fractional M&A Advisor, we work alongside you as a retained senior partner, bringing decades of corporate finance experience directly to your business, delivered flexibly and in a way that is cost effective and proportionate to the scale of what you are trying to achieve. You get partner-level expertise precisely when you need it, whether that means leading a single transaction, supporting an internal team through a busy period, running an ongoing programme of acquisitions, or a pre-DD financial review, without the overhead of a permanent hire or the fees of a large institutional advisory firm.

This is a genuine, ongoing relationship. We are engaged with your business, your goals and your timeline well before a deal is live, and we stay engaged after it completes.

Larger groups that acquire regularly build an internal M&A team, which is responsible for sourcing opportunities, running disciplined diligence, structuring deals and managing a pipeline of targets over time. Most owner-managed and growing businesses cannot justify that investment, even when acquisition is central to their strategy.

We fill that role. Whether you are considering a single, one-off acquisition or building a genuine buy-and-build programme, we act as your in-house M&A function would if you had one, bringing the same discipline, sector knowledge and rigour that exists within larger groups.

For a single acquisition, we lead the process from strategy through to completion. For an ongoing programme, our role extends further: helping you design the acquisition strategy itself, building a consistent approach to sourcing and assessing targets and providing the continuity that a stop-start use of external advisers cannot offer. Either way, we work as a proactive partner in your growth.

For off-market, proprietary acquisitions, owner-managed businesses will often be unprepared for an approach and diligence required by acquirors, especially from private equity or large corporate buyers. Financial data will often be disorganised, inconsistent, or spread across multiple systems that were never built to support a transaction. Accounts are often unaudited. When a deal process begins, this becomes a serious obstacle. Buyers and investors cannot trust the financial information to support valuation or the investment thesis. This causes delays in the process, uncontrolled diligence costs and founders withdrawing from the process.

We work directly with private equity firms and other acquirers assessing a target, to get underlying financial data into a state that supports a credible diligence process. This is practical, hands-on work: understanding what exists, where the gaps and inconsistencies are, and building it into something a buyer or investor can rely on.

Selling your business is likely to be the most significant financial event of your working life, and it rarely begins on your own terms. Whether a buyer makes an approach out of nowhere, or a competitor or private equity starts asking questions. Multiple parties circle at once, each with their own agenda and their own idea of what the business is worth.

In these moments, owners are at their most exposed and need to stay calm, focused and not be forced down buyer driven timelines. You will be negotiating against people who do this for a living, often without an informed view on whether an offer is fair, a structure is sound, or a process is being managed in your interests.

This is where we act. We work with owner-managed businesses that have been approached by a buyer and want proper representation in the conversation that follows. We work with businesses managing interest from multiple parties who need a clear, objective view before entertaining or accepting any offer. And we work with owners who want to prepare properly, well before any approach or formal process begins, so that if and when the moment comes, they are ready for it rather than reacting to it.

A stock market listing is a fundamentally different process to a trade sale, governed by a distinct set of rules and requirements set out by markets such as AIM and Aquis. Where a sale process is about presenting a business to a single buyer, or a small number of them, a listing is about meeting standards that public market investors and regulators expect as a matter of course.

We work with businesses that are planning, or seriously considering, a listing on AIM or Aquis. Our role is focused on the specific accounting and financial areas these rules demand, and that businesses are often least prepared for: historical financial information covering the required track record, a robust working capital forecast model and the financial reporting and controls that will withstand scrutiny from the market and its advisers. We help close these gaps well before the transaction itself begins, so that when the formal process starts, the accounting foundations are already in place.