There are numerous ways of sourcing a deal. You may have already been into the market and done some searching. This might be your first foray into searching and you don’t know where to start. You may even have a specific target business in your sights but you haven’t been able to progress too far.
The biggest challenge private buyers face is gaining credibility and traction with the sell side advisers. Private buyers are not taken too seriously by sellers advisers as they are deemed to be the poor relation to a trade or private equity buyer.
There is some truth in this idea; the reason being that funders need a reasonable amount of capital to be invested by the private individual, often over £100,000. Combined with this, there is a general level of historic evidence which points to the fact that transactions by private buyers don’t always succeed for the long term, post completion.
But Valius is changing this. By becoming part of our buyer community, you automatically benefit from the combined goodwill and credibility Valius has with the sellers and therefore, gain the traction to get your business purchase process moving at speed. This is very difficult to achieve when trying to source your own deals. By being a Valius member, you can engage directly with the deal leader from the sellers’ advisers and liaise with them through your own private Buyer Hub within the Valius portal.
The process of finding a business to purchase can take many months to achieve. The right acquisition might be found within 2-3 months but equally, it could be elusive and take 6-12 months to source the right one. That said, it is likely that you’ll view and review a number of businesses before finding the right one where you have an offer accepted by the sellers.
In order to source the right business to buy, you need to be able to feel that you’ve thoroughly researched and examined the market and that the target is the right one. The ability to see hundreds of businesses for sale all in one place gives business buyers the chance to effect a target search in an efficient, speedy and timely manner.
The Valius platform NDA signature process means that buyers can gain access to the sellers’ advisers with minimum fuss and in turn, access the Information Memorandum (IM) as quickly as possible which is vital in ensuring you maximise the results from the time spent searching the platform.
This is where the Valius platform can benefit you, with hundreds of businesses from many different sellers’ advisers all in one place, which are searchable at the touch of a button and storable in your own private Buyer Hub area, for immediate or future review and assessment.
You can view businesses for sale via our BuyerBase model for only £7.99 per month which will give you full sight of all the companies for sale at the time. If you’d like to progress any of the search results with the seller’s personal deal leader/adviser, then you can step up to our BuyerPlus model which is priced at £49.99 per month. This step up also involves signing our non disclosure agreement (NDA) which covers you to view all businesses listed on the platform and to progress interest in any of these by liaising directly with the sell side deal leader via your own personal search area in the Buyer Hub.
This is a bit like saying “how long is a piece of string”. There is no definitive answer. Suffice to say that it is unlikely that you will look at one business and it will be the right one. It’s more likely that, over a period of 3 months, for example, you will review 20 targets and this will whittle down to around 5 which are progressed to an initial meeting with the sellers. Of these, you might decide to offer on 1-2 businesses. There’s no guarantee that your offer will be accepted and so the searching can continue. The beauty of the Valius portal means that you can keep searching with ease and new businesses will populate your search results as they come through from the sellers advisers, on a daily basis.
Normally, you can expect to take at least 6-12 months to find and complete the right business purchase but this can be longer. It all depends on finding the right target business at the earliest opportunity.
A company where the vendor/owner is considering retirement is always a good focus. As is one where the owner has a paternalistic view and wants to leave some form of legacy for their efforts. Such owners don’t necessarily wish to sell to a trade buyer for the highest price, but often they would rather see continuity of trade at the existing site, full staff retention and “business as usual” once the deal has completed. This is what you, as a private buyer, can offer.