ETSC is a boutique M&A advisory firm specialising in the sale of privately held businesses with enterprise values of £1m–£50m.

Early in my career, I sat on both sides of transactions. I advised buyers, I advised sellers, and I watched deals work and watched deals fail. What became clear very quickly is that the seller is almost always the least prepared person in the room.

A buyer is a professional acquirer. They have done this before and are experts who acquire businesses daily. They have advisors, legal teams, accountants and a due diligence process designed to identify everything that reduces the price they pay. The seller has, in most cases, done this once or has never done it.

That asymmetry bothered me. Focusing on the sell side felt like the right place to make a real difference to real people. The founder who has built something over twenty years deserves to exit with an outcome that reflects that work, not one that reflects how poorly prepared they were for a process they had never been through before.

Two things, consistently.

The first is going to market without a formal, defensible valuation. Most brokers give you an indicative range based on a rough multiple. That range exists to win the mandate, not to withstand scrutiny from a sophisticated buyer. When a buyer challenges your numbers in due diligence, you need something you can defend. A broker's estimate is not that.

The second is owner dependency. If the business cannot operate without you, a buyer is acquiring a job, not a company. They will either price that risk in substantially, or they will walk away. Businesses that are genuinely transferable, with documented processes, a capable team, and no single-client or single-employee concentration, consistently achieve better prices and cleaner exits. This also ties in with being prepared for the journey of selling a business, which is a stark contrast to running it.

Both of these are fixable. But they take time. Which is why the right time to start the conversation is well before you need to sell, not when you are ready to go to market tomorrow.

Anyone in the UK can call themselves a business broker or M&A advisor. There is no regulatory body, no required qualification, and no professional accountability. That is the reality of the market a business owner navigates when they decide to sell.

Qualifications are not a guarantee of quality, but they do represent a commitment to a standard. My valuation qualifications through IMAA, ACCA, and IIBV mean I produce reports that comply with internationally recognised standards. That matters when a buyer's accountant or lender is scrutinising the numbers.

The Fellow of the Institute of Consulting designation is about the advisory relationship itself. It carries a professional code of conduct, a requirement to act in the client's interest, and accountability to a professional body. In an unregulated industry, that is reassuring.

It starts with a formal valuation, not a broker's estimate. You need to know what the business is worth before you go to market, not after you have already committed to a process. You also need to spend time preparing the business for sale and creating the data room, so that any deal-breaking issues can be dealt with before a buyer finds them. Preparing a business for sale can take three to six months.

From there, we identify the right buyers. Most corporate finance companies approach funds, private equity, and venture capital. ETSC focuses on sourcing strategic acquirers because they are the buyers who pay the most. A strategic buyer pays for what your business adds to theirs. That distinction is worth understanding before you begin.

Then we run a structured process that creates genuine competitive tension. Most business owners sell to the first serious buyer who approaches. That is rarely the best outcome. A structured process, where multiple buyers are aware of each other's interest, changes the dynamic entirely and protects your position throughout.

Every client works directly with me from the initial valuation through to final completion.

The Value Builder System is a methodology I have used for over ten years. It has assessed more than 90,000 businesses worldwide, which means the benchmarking data behind it is genuinely meaningful. It is not a theoretical framework. It is built on what actually drives value in real transactions.

It measures a business across eight drivers: financial performance, growth potential, recurring revenue, customer concentration, owner dependency, differentiation, cash flow quality, and customer satisfaction. Those eight factors, taken together, predict how attractive a business will be to a buyer and at what price.

What I find useful is that it makes the conversation specific. Rather than telling a client their business needs to be less dependent on them, we can show them exactly where they score, how that compares to businesses that have sold at premium multiples, and what changing that score would mean in practice for their exit proceeds.

Businesses scoring above 80 on these combined drivers receive offers 71% higher than average. That figure comes from 90,000 assessments. It is not a marketing claim.

ETSC works with privately held UK-based and international businesses with enterprise values between £1 million and £50 million. That is the segment that is genuinely underserved. These businesses are too large for a simple business broker and too small for the large corporate finance houses, who typically place junior analysts on anything under £20 million.

In terms of sector, we have particular depth in technology, including software businesses, SaaS, IT services, and managed service providers. But the advisory methodology is sector-agnostic. The principles of how you value a business, prepare it for sale, find the right buyers, and negotiate the right outcome apply equally to a healthcare business, a professional services firm, a retailer, or a manufacturer.

ETSC is not the right fit for businesses that are not yet profitable, distressed businesses looking for a quick exit at any price, or owners who want someone to simply list their business and see what comes in. We prepare first, then sell. The preparation is the difference.

Start now. Not because there is urgency, but because two to three years is exactly the right window to do the work that actually moves the outcome.

The businesses that achieve the best exits are almost always the ones that were deliberately prepared. Recurring revenue takes time to build. Reducing owner dependency takes time. Cleaning up the financial records, documenting processes, and diversifying the customer base are not things you can do in the six weeks before you go to market.

The conversation I would have with any owner in that position is the Endgame Conversation. Four questions that define what a successful exit looks like for them specifically. What is the desired exit route? By when? How much do they need to walk away with? And how close is the business to that number today?

The gap between where the business is and where it needs to be is what drives the next two or three years of work. It is a much more motivating way to run a business than simply hoping someone makes an offer.