What Changes When the Person Across the Table Has Bought Eighty Businesses
Introduction
Richard has run a specialist manufacturing business in mid-Devon for twenty-six years. Turnover is around £6.5m, the order book is decent, and his daughter works in the business but does not want to run it. When a national group makes contact in March, he is flattered and slightly relieved. They are polite, well prepared, and they know his sector. They have a template for the process and a timetable to go with it.
What Richard does not know, because nobody tells him, is that this group completed four acquisitions in the previous eighteen months. Their corporate development director has sat in his chair — the seller's kitchen, the seller's boardroom — more times than Richard has sold anything larger than a machine tool.
Richard is a composite, drawn from a pattern rather than from any one business. The pattern is real, and in the South West it is currently everywhere.
1) The Buyers Active Here Are Repeat Buyers
Look at what has actually completed in the region over the past few months.
In May, British Garden Centres acquired St Bridget Nurseries in Exeter — a business growing plants in the city since 1925, expanded from a single acre to around 100 acres, and in its fourth generation of Langdon family ownership. For the buyer, it was site number eighty, and it followed six other acquisitions completed earlier the same year.
In July, Ipsum Group bought NPB Utilities of Yeovil, a water and utility services engineering business, and completed a second acquisition within the week. Those followed liquid waste specialist CountyClean in January and Wilkinson Environmental in March.
Days later, Kitwave Wholesale Group acquired Charles Saunders of Yate, one of the largest family-owned foodservice companies in the South West, placing it alongside four other businesses already inside the same division. The same week, private equity-backed accountancy group DJH entered the region for the first time by buying Gooding Accounts of Trowbridge, a practice founded in 2014 — DJH now runs close to 900 people across 20 offices. Earlier in the month, Assisi Pet Care took Okehampton-based Forthglade, founded in 1971, into a portfolio of established pet food brands.
And in January, Ranger Fire and Security bought Partnership Fire and Security of Dorset — its fourteenth purchase since launching in February 2024, and its second South West business after a Plymouth acquisition the previous year.
Six sellers. Six businesses built over decades, several over generations. Six buyers who had each done this recently, repeatedly, and with a process already written down.
Deals above as reported by TheBusinessDesk.com, Insider Media and Business Sale Report, January to July 2026.
Founder Insight: "The flattery arrives first." Being approached by a credible national group feels like validation, and after twenty years of nobody noticing, that matters more than founders expect. The feeling is legitimate. It is also the point at which the buyer's timetable quietly becomes your timetable.
2) Where the Experience Gap Actually Costs You
The gap is not about intelligence, and rarely about honesty. Most repeat acquirers are straightforward. The gap is about repetition, and it shows up in four places.
Sequence. A serial acquirer knows what order to ask for things in, and what each answer is worth. You are seeing the sequence for the first time and cannot tell which questions are routine and which are load-bearing.
Drafting. Whoever writes the first version of the heads of terms sets the shape of every subsequent argument. Repeat buyers arrive with theirs already drafted.
Pricing the risk. They have priced customer concentration — too much revenue sitting with too few clients — a dozen times. They know what discount it usually carries. You will be told what it carries this time, with no reference point of your own.
Patience. They have other deals. You have one, and by month four you are tired, your finance director is tired, and the business has been running with the handbrake on.
That last one is the expensive one. Experian MarketIQ's data shows more extensive buyer due diligence lengthening the gap between announcement and completion across the UK market. A longer process punishes whoever has less stamina, and that is almost always the seller.
🚩 Diligence Flag: "The rolling information request". Repeat buyers work from a standing list, so requests arrive in waves rather than all at once, each wave apparently small. Two months in you have handed over your entire commercial position while nothing has been agreed on your side. Pre-empt it by agreeing the scope of diligence in the heads of terms, and by tying any period of exclusivity — where you agree to stop talking to other buyers — to a fixed end date rather than to the buyer's progress.
Action step: Before you answer the second information request, write down what you have already given them and what you have received in return. If the columns are lopsided, say so before the third request lands.
3) "This Is Just Our Standard Process"
You will hear a version of this sentence. Sometimes it is true. Sometimes it is drafting advantage wearing a uniform.
Genuinely standard: a data room built in the order their diligence team works through, a warranty schedule shaped by their previous deals, a completion accounts mechanism — the post-completion true-up that adjusts the price for the working capital and cash actually in the business on the day.
Not standard, whatever they call it: the length of an earn-out, where part of your price depends on the business hitting agreed targets after you have sold it. UK corporate finance commentary puts most SME earn-out periods at one to three years, with two years the most common. A three-year period is inside the normal range and is still a negotiation, not a house rule. Nor is the split between cash on completion and money deferred, nor how much sits behind an indemnity, nor how the earn-out targets are measured and who controls the levers that move them.
The useful question is not whether a term is standard for them. It is whether it is standard for deals of this size in this sector — and that is a question your adviser can answer and their corporate development director would rather you did not ask.
Founder Insight: "You are negotiating with a department, not a person." The individual across the table is pleasant and probably means what they say. They are also reporting to an investment committee with a model, a hurdle rate and a view on what your business is worth to them. Warmth in the room does not change the number in the model.
4) What a Serial Acquirer Is Actually Buying
Here is the part that works in your favour, and most founders never use it.
A repeat buyer is not buying a business in isolation. They are buying an addition to something. Charles Saunders went into a foodservice division that already held four comparable businesses. NPB Utilities strengthened a water division at a moment of sustained investment in UK water infrastructure. Gooding Accounts gave DJH a first position in a region it had not covered.
That means they have a reason for wanting yours specifically, and it is usually one of three: a region they cannot otherwise enter, a capability they would take years to build, or customers they want and cannot reach. Whichever it is, it is worth more to them than your standalone earnings suggest — and they will not volunteer which one it is.
Ask. Directly, early, and before any exclusivity. What does this do for you that your last acquisition did not? What happens to your plan if this does not complete? The answers tell you how much the business is worth to that buyer, which is a different and usually larger number than what it is worth generally.
Action step: Write down, in one sentence, why this particular buyer wants this particular business. If you cannot, you do not yet know enough to negotiate.
5) The Preparation That Closes the Gap
You cannot acquire their experience. You can remove the advantages that come from your lack of it.
Have more than one conversation running. Not to start an auction, but because a single buyer sets the price, the pace and the terms. This is harder when the approach is unsolicited, which is exactly why it matters.
Get the file in order before you are asked. The clean version of this is unglamorous: three years of normalised accounts — profit adjusted for one-off and owner-specific costs so a buyer sees the real run rate — signed customer contracts, a tidy share register, employment paperwork, and an honest list of what is missing. A buyer who has done eighty deals recognises a well-kept business in the first week, and they price it differently from one that surprises them in week nine.
Decide your red lines in writing, before the process starts. The minimum cash on completion. What you will and will not do about staying on. What you would walk away over. Deal momentum erodes positions that were never written down.
Bring in someone who has seen the sequence. Your accountant and solicitor hold their own ground and hold it well. What most founders lack is somebody who has watched this process from the seller's side before and can tell them, in the moment, whether the thing they are worrying about is normal.
🚩 Diligence Flag: "The late adjustment". Repeat buyers know that a price adjustment raised at week ten costs a tired seller less to concede than the same adjustment raised at week two. Pre-empt it by agreeing at heads of terms what can move the price and what cannot, and by requiring any adjustment to be evidenced against a defined baseline rather than a revised view.
Doing It Once, Properly
The South West is not short of capital. On the British Business Bank's 2026 Small Business Equity Tracker, equity investment into the region's smaller businesses rose 104% in 2025 to £687m, the largest percentage increase of any UK nation or region, while the number of deals fell 13% to 121. That is equity funding rather than acquisitions, and the rise came from a handful of large transactions in AI and energy. But the shape matches what the deal flow shows: capital concentrating into fewer, larger transactions, done by people who do them often.
The founders who come out of that well are not the ones who negotiate hardest. They are the ones who arrive at the table already prepared, already knowing what they will not accept, and already talking to more than one person. Richard's approach in March was not a problem. Meeting it unprepared would have been.
If you are within two years of a sale, or have already had the call, the work worth doing is the work that happens before the buyer's timetable starts. We help founders do exactly that, and we do not get paid on whether the deal happens.
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Disclaimer
This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or regulated investment advice. Examples cited are based on composite scenarios for illustrative purposes. Exit Strategy & Solutions is not responsible for decisions made based on information in this article.
