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Had coffee with the owner of an executive search firm last night. She seemed fed up. “We only grew EBITDA from £1.2m to £1.3m this year. Feels like we’re standing still.” I had to stop her right there. 1/6

Is there anything more frustrating than having to request a live demo just to find out the price of a piece of software?

“Honestly, I just always read the exec summary and skip straight to the financial section” I was working on the complex carve-out for a £1bn+ US industrial products manufacturer. Our due diligence team produced an incredible vendor DD pack. Without their help, we’d never have produced the result we did. The figures were a complete mess. Helping with the vendor pack was a pretty new, fast-rising wiz kid. The best thing about him was not only that he saw all the risks in the financials incredibly quickly but also that he could explain them simply and get people without any background in finance to understand them, too. He was the kind of guy who would go to every appraisal and promotion review with data pulled out on his contributions relative to the rest of the team – hard, cold facts demonstrating how he was outperforming in key areas. He also had an incredible work ethic. And the private equity houses loved him. He quickly became the team member most requested by some of our most important PE clients. But I still remember early on, when we were trying to get him up to speed with our carve out, and we sent him key sections of our IM. We arranged to catch up later and answer any missing questions. When we did, I referenced something in one of those sections. He was brutally honest. “Honestly, I just read the exec summary and skip straight through to the financial section. That’s what I always do”. I was pretty shocked. Early on in my career, it had been drilled into me how important a CIM / information memorandum was. It was our chance to show all the key selling points of our client’s business, build competitive tension in the auction process, and maximise the value for our client. We would obsess about getting every detail right, about making sure we didn't miss anything that could make a buyer interested. And here we were, finding out most of it was often skipped by a fast-track director trusted by our best and most successful private equity clients. As I’ve reflected on this, heard similar comments, and moved on to the investment side, it's become much clearer and made much more sense. In reality, the sellside often wants to make sure they’ve not missed anything. This means that IMs nearly always end up with far too much filler. On the best deals, with lots of interest, bankers / brokers are also often trying to show each buyer what they need to see and cover lots of detail across completely different areas. This contrasts with the approach of buyers. Why did so many funds love this person so much? It was because he cut straight to the point. He knew where the real risks were early on and didn't waste any time digging into them. This get’s to the real point. Buyers don’t want the fluff. They want to get to important issues. Quickly. They don't care that the management team has 95+ combined years experience in the industry. Or that the market is Xbn in size and will grow 3% per year. They want to know the main numbers, the real key investments highlights and the actual growth opportunities. The more growth opportunities in an IM, and the more key investment highlights, the less each one is believed and valued. This taught me something fundamental about selling businesses. We often confuse thoroughness with value. But comprehensiveness can actually dilute your message. When everything is highlighted as important, nothing is. A much more focused approach tends to close faster and often at better multiples. Not because they hide information – but because they respect the buyer’s time and intelligence. For brokers and sellers: your job isn’t to document every possible angle. It’s to illuminate the path to value creation. And at the end of the day, the confidence to leave things out is often more powerful than the compulsion to include everything in.

Massively agree with Mikk's conclusion here. Don't be distracted by a vanity metric. IMO, yes, focus on getting out there and meeting brokers and business owners. Yes, get in the reps. But while gaining experience through volume is beneficial initially, it's much better to quickly narrow in and focus your search than to spray and pray offers. That isn't how you will close on a high-quality business at a reasonable price, where you have any real likelihood of building value.

What are the alternatives to Gamma? People bash on PowerPoint and it's outdated, but I have invested so much time in Office products that I need to be sure before investing the time elsewhere...

The UK government doesn't appreciate that the constant dithering on tax changes inevitably stalls the economy. Every couple of months, a new proposed change is leaked... and everyone pauses spending, investing, buying. Waiting so they don't get caught out. Perfect example: I rent in London. I've been looking at buying a flat with my wife for months. I'd been hesitant to pull the trigger because I didn't think the growth I'd make would be higher than the costs of owning – primarily stamp duty. Now, stamp duty might be getting abolished and replaced with a smaller, but annual, property tax. But who knows? I'm not sure how long we would own it. We'll likely want something bigger once we have kids. So the change could be significant for us if we wanted to get a bigger place quickly. All we can do is wait and see. That is what happens. Everyone delays decision-making. Less money being spent, less trading for businesses close to that month's tax. Less potential growth for the economy.

Watching the interpretations / commentary on the election results come through is always fascinating. Whatever your thoughts on the quality of Labour's mandate, with a significant majority in parliament, the government will be able to push on with its manifesto and agenda.

Genuinely surprised to see this. It's not often you hear about Brits being too optimistic...

Honestly, you’d be surprised how big a company can be with no finance function or a terrible one. I've even seen it in plenty of private equity deals. Often in an old-school industry, if revenue is growing and cash looks good, owners of massive businesses will still run them based on the bank account and gut feel.

As a family office, or investor using your own capital, the ultimate thing you are afforded is flexibility. You don't have your own investors / LPs, and this reduces your restrictions in a number of ways: - You don't have predetermined sectors you committed too when raising - You can also look at sectors traditionally considered undesirable (a perfect example being our core focus — recruitment / staffing — with its key man risk, cyclicality, etc.) - You can buy / invest in businesses even when their growth is flat, or in an inopportune moment in their growth cycles. This is because you are not under pressure to return capital, allowing you to invest for a longer time period and be more patient in your investment decisions.

I've heard and spoken to a few people recently who have been looking to acquire commercial cleaning businesses via ETA. Yes, they're often sold at comparatively low multiples compared to other sectors. But… always make sure to question why that business trades at the lower amount. For commercial cleaning, you get recurring cleaning contracts, but in other ways the businesses are a lot less scalable than many others. This is often the case when running any people business (we would know), but for cleaning the people management is inherently incredibly time consuming and difficult. It’s also super hard to differentiate yourselves IMO. Is that business (or business model) cheap because I’ve seen something no one else has, or is it because of missed something? Something I always ask myself and I’d recommend you do too.