How do we list our firm for sale or merger with you?
Very simple - select the level of service you want to use - Bronze, Gold, Platinum or Platinum Plus, and then place your order. Full information here.
Next Steps
We will make contact with you to progress. This usually involves providing us with a range of information including your most recent accounts.
Paragraph of Sale
Once we have received the first batch of information, we will put together a proposed paragraph of sale, which will be the only information that is released to third parties without your express consent. This is usually brief and quite vague. If you have a look at our list of firms for sale (click here) you will see that some descriptions are extremely vague as to location, which of course anonymises your listing.
Marketing
Once you have approved the paragraph of information we list your firm on our system for sale and notify our buyers that a new practice has gone live. If you have opted for our premium services, we will ensure you get priority in our regular weekly law firm for sale updates, and also our monthly newsletters which for law firms go out to 17,000 law firms & solicitors and for accountancy practices c8,500 accountants. For Platinum and Platinum Plus Sellers we will also commence advertising on various professional broker sites and in the Law Society Gazette (for law firms).
At all times we keep you updated with any new buyer enquiries that come through about your practice. Buyers will never know your identity without your express consent each time.
Click here to choose your Seller Service Level.
How long will it take to sell my business?
This is the first question we always get asked by everyone who lists their business on the Jonathan Fagan website. It is quite an easy question to answer because it is pretty much always 'how long is a piece of string'.
Law Firm Sales
The usual length of a law firm sale depends on a number of factors. Firstly, if you are a retiring solicitor with a practice that consists of yourself, perhaps your partner and a couple of support staff, coupled with a turnover of about £200k and a mainly conveyancing and wills & probate practice, then it is quite possible it will take between one and three years to sell your firm. This is not always the case, and our fastest sale in this category is six weeks, but similarly we have law firms listed with us who have been registered with us for over two years, and despite various conversations with potential buyers they are still up for sale.
If you are a law firm with very few clients and essentially selling as a shell, then it is possible that your practice will sell in less than three months.
If your firm has a turnover of more than £500k and less than £2,000,000 then it may well take between two and four years to find a potential buyer.
Our fastest deal ever has been three weeks and our longest one took two and a half years to go through the process from start to finish. The process of selling a firm does not just end when you find a potential buyer. The next process is due diligence and whether or not you manage to get through this process as well as the agreement to sell is another matter entirely.
In the first instance you need to be aware that there are a number of factors affecting how long it takes to sell your firm, which can include whether or not your practice has claims against it, the price you are looking for in order to affect a sale and also the information you have available to any potential buyer in order to progress the sale once discussions have started.
Firms that tend to be listed with us for a long time tend to have particular problems with the information they have available to provide to potential buyers. Quite often partners who have been in the same firm for many years and have never embraced case management systems find it very difficult to collate the information together that any potential buyer is looking for. Buyers want details of just about everything and they want to be able to access it easily without having to trawl through copious amounts of paperwork dating back many years. One sale we have come across was with a firm where everything was paper based and the buyer had estimated that he needed to actually employ someone to go through and deal with the paper files in order to make the business function once he had taken over.
A practice that uses case management software, has all the clients readily accessible and perhaps also in a spreadsheet, has details of everything from staff numbers through to the photocopying contract in one place for the buyer to see, will find it a lot easier to sell their practice than somebody who has no information available or very little, and is unable or unwilling to provide answers to questions when asked.
Accountancy Practices
Accountancy practices are very different. There is at the moment a huge market for the buying and selling of accountancy firms and practices do not tend to stay on the market for lengthy periods of time. We would expect for most firms to have offers in place from at least 3 potential buyers within a matter of days, if not a few weeks. Again it will very much depend on your willingness to be active and respond swiftly to queries and requests. Offers are usually quick to come in and most buyers do not waste time in getting to a reasonable package. This is an extremely busy market with lots of active buyers out there with money to spend.
Summary
So if you want to know how long your practice is going to take to sell then the answer is anything from three weeks through to about four years, but depends very much on your specific circumstances, the size of your firm and the information you have available to potential buyers. Accountancy practices should usually sell virtually immediately but law firms really depend.
How much is my business worth?
This is the number one question for just about everyone running a business. If I sell the business as a going concern, what is it worth? You can leap into an internet rabbit hole and start reading about complicated equations and multipliers affecting particular industries or professions. There are quite literally hundreds of ways of valuing a business, in particular law firms, that most of the figures that professional advisers come up with contradict others.
Accountancy firms are fairly simple - there tends to be a very easy valuation technique that works well for most and the industry seem to accept it as the norm. This is to calculate your gross recurring fees and multiply them by a factor, which tends to be around 1.2 at the time of writing this FAQ. This does very much depend on the quality of the gross recurring fees - obviously 300 recurring fees from clients aged 92 are not going to be worth as much as 300 recurring fees from clients aged 32!
Law firms unfortunately have no such easy solution when it comes to valuations. At varying times we are able to spot a trend - but this depends very much on the market conditions. Sometimes figures plummet to very little indeed, but we do usually recommend ignoring the copious articles available on the web advising sellers that their practices are not worth anything at all. If you look at who writes the articles it does tend to explain why someone would write this (the authors tend to be linked to buyers!).
Of course there is an old saying - valuation is vanity, sterling is sanity. Beware the business broker bearing gifts of ridiculously high valuations to flatter you into giving them business.
We offer valuation services - details here.
What experience do you have of selling law firms and accountancy practices?
Jonathan Fagan Business Brokers have over 20 years experience with the sale and purchase of firms. We came across mergers & acquisitions work through our recruitment business in the legal and finance sectors and in recent years we have expanded our offering to provide specialist business brokerage services. At any time we will be working on at least 15 potential deals and have at least 5 deals going through the process of completing once a price has been agreed. Our company has seen an average of one deal complete per month for the past 12 months although we anticipate this increasing over the next few years to one deal every week.
Our experience tends to be based on previous deals and negotiations - we know what firms sell for at any time and we try to provide our expertise to both the sellers and buyers on an impartial basis. Buyers and sellers tend to go from one extreme to the other - buyers look to pay as little as possible up front and sellers seek as much cash as they can get at the outset. Buyers want sellers tied in for as long as possible, sellers want out as quickly as possible! Deals occur when a compromise between these two positions can be reached.
How secure is our data?
Owners of law firms and accountancy practices can be assured that any data sent to Jonathan Fagan is kept highly confidential. We never release any information about your business without your express consent in every circumstance and we do not divulge any detail to third parties. The only information ever disclosed to buyers about sellers is the paragraph of information displayed on our website. Anything else requires the specific consent of the seller.
All buyers and sellers sign a non-disclosure agreement at the start of the process and we renew these with potential buyers every 12 months.
We are Cyber Essentials accredited. Our sister companies Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited and TP Transcription Limited are Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus and ISO 27001 accredited respectively. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as data controllers.
Our IT system is constantly updated, our computers are protected by a high spec Draytek firewall and Panda anti-virus software, and our website is protected by security software.
Jonathan Fagan Business Brokers Limited is part of the Ten Percent Group of websites, which include legal & financial recruitment services.
