Straight answers,before you ask us for them

Six to nine months is typical, from the day you formally appoint an adviser to the day the money reaches your account. Preparation adds anywhere from three to twelve months before that, and it is usually where the most value is built or lost. Deals with property, several sites, or a contested negotiation run longer.

Valuation and preparation first, then the materials a buyer and their bank will want to read, then approaches to buyers under a confidentiality agreement, then offers, then the checking stage that lawyers call due diligence, and finally the legal work that gets the money paid. We run all of it, so the only parts that take your time are the ones that genuinely need you.

Less than owners expect during the search and offer stages, because the approaches come from us. Due diligence is the demanding part, usually a few hours a week for two to three months, and it lands at the moment you most need to keep trading well. Preparing the information in advance is the single best way to protect your own time later.

Not from us, and not until you decide. Buyer outreach is anonymous, and nobody sees your name before signing a confidentiality agreement. The harder question is internal, because a small number of your people will need to know before completion. We work out who, when, and in what order with you well before any approach goes out.

Often, yes. Owners sell a majority stake and stay involved, sell one site out of several, or sell the trade and keep the building. Each route reaches a different set of buyers and produces a different number, which is why the question is worth settling before anyone goes to market rather than after an offer arrives.

It happens, and the most common causes are the ones that were visible at the start: figures that do not survive checking, a compliance issue nobody raised, or a buyer who could never fund it. A properly run process fails early and cheaply rather than late and expensively, because the qualifying happens before you are emotionally committed to a buyer.

A business is worth what the right buyer will pay, and the right buyer is rarely the obvious one. The number comes from your adjusted profit, the multiple a buyer applies to it, and the value of any property, then it moves according to how much of the business depends on you. The valuation calculator gives you a first view in about two minutes.

Care homes sell for three to ten times adjusted profit, home care agencies for two to seven, aesthetic clinics for two to six and a half and dental practices for three and a half to nine. Those ranges value the trading business. For a care home you own, that means the profit left after a fair rent for the building, otherwise the building would be counted twice, and we then value the building separately and add it on top, because two homes with the same profit can sit in very different buildings, from a well-kept purpose-built home to an older property that needs major work. Asking prices on our Market Index are quoted as advertised, and for a freehold home they usually include the building. Home care agencies, dental practices and aesthetic clinics are valued on profit alone, with any property treated separately. Within each range, how the business runs without its owner, its regulatory record and the reliability of its income decide where it sits. Current asking multiples for care homes and home care agencies are on our Senior Residential Care and Home Care Agency Market Index pages.

It is your profit before interest, tax and the accounting charges for wear and tear on assets. Buyers use it because it strips out the things that change the moment the business has a new owner and a different bank. What matters more is what gets added back to it: an owner salary above market rate, one-off costs, and personal expenses that will not continue.

Add-backs are costs in your accounts that will not exist for a new owner, added back to profit so the buyer sees what the business really earns. A buyer will accept the ones you can evidence and argue about the ones you cannot. The difference between an add-back you can prove and one you merely assert is often tens of thousands of pounds on the final price.

It changes the shape of the deal more than it changes the multiple. Owning the building widens your options, because you can sell everything together, sell the trade and keep the building as an income, or sell the building to an investor while the business runs on a lease. Each route reaches different buyers. There is more on this in One Care Home, Two Assets.

Some valuations are opinions and some are pitches. A number given to win your instruction is not the same as a number a funded buyer will pay after their bank has read the file. We would rather be honest early and right later, because an inflated expectation costs you months and usually ends in a repriced deal.

On three fronts at once: what a buyer will pay, what a lender will advance, and how many buyers turn up at all. A rating below Good narrows your buyer pool to people who are professionals at pricing risk. We set out the mechanics in Buyers Read Your CQC Rating Before They Read Your Accounts.

Regional and national operators filling gaps in their coverage, investor-backed platforms, property-led investors where you own the building, families and management teams moving from one site to several, and occasionally your own team through a buy-out. The right buyer is the one who values what you have built most highly, and that is rarely the most obvious name.

Sometimes, and they are among the most active buyers in healthcare. They also run the most demanding checking process, ask for the most detail, and are the most likely to want part of the price paid later against future performance. A higher headline number is not always a higher number in your account.

An unsolicited approach can be flattering, but it is almost always below what a competitive process would produce, because a buyer with no competition has no reason to pay full price. What you say in that first meeting matters more than most owners realise, so it is worth taking advice before it rather than after.

We hold proprietary enriched data on the entire UK healthcare sector, built through several pipelines and feeding a live outreach programme. Rather than listing your business and waiting to see who answers, we work out who should want it and approach them directly, including buyers who have never watched a marketplace in their lives.

Enough that you are choosing rather than accepting. The number varies by sector and size, but the objective never does: competing offers running in parallel rather than one after another, because competition is the single thing that most reliably moves your price.

Frequently, for anywhere between three months and two years, and how you feel about that should shape which buyers you talk to. Some want you gone with a clean handover and some want you running the business for years. It is far easier to decide this at the start than to discover it in the middle of a negotiation.

Twelve to twenty-four months before going to market is where preparation makes the most difference. Six months is workable. Under three months is reactive, usually triggered by an offer or an event, and it almost always leaves money behind. If the question has crossed your mind, it is already worth a conversation, even if a sale is years away.

Clean, consistent management figures. A business that runs when you are not there. Settled staff, and in care that means the registered manager above all. A compliance record with no surprises in it. Contracts and property matters tidied up rather than explained away. None of it is glamorous and all of it shows up in the price.

More than any other single factor, because a buyer is purchasing a business rather than your job. Where the relationships, decisions and knowledge sit with one person, the buyer prices the risk that it all leaves with them. The work of making yourself less essential takes twelve to twenty-four months and cannot be faked in the final quarter.

The exit readiness audit asks about the things a buyer in your sector actually examines, scores you across five areas, and tells you where preparation would pay most. It is free and you get your score straight away.

It is a solvable problem if you start early and an expensive one if you do not. Buyers do not expect audited perfection from an owner-managed business, but they do expect the numbers to hold up when checked. Every question your figures cannot answer becomes either a price reduction or a delay.

Only where the return shows up in the sale price, which is a narrower set of things than most owners assume. Spending on the building rarely pays for itself. Spending on the team, the reporting and the compliance record usually does. We would rather tell you not to spend the money than watch you spend it on the wrong thing.

Not always. Part of the price is often paid later, either held back against warranties or tied to how the business performs after you leave. How much, for how long, and on what conditions is negotiable, and it is one of the places where advice earns its fee several times over.

It is a portion of the price paid later, conditional on the business hitting agreed figures after the sale. It can be reasonable where you are staying involved and have real influence, and it can be a way of quietly reducing the price where you are not. The detail of how performance is measured matters more than the headline amount.

In a share sale the buyer takes the company as it stands, with its history, contracts and liabilities. In an asset sale they take specific assets and leave the company behind with you. Sellers usually prefer a share sale and buyers often prefer assets, and in regulated healthcare the registration position frequently settles the argument.

Promises you make about the business in the sale contract, and specific protections the buyer asks for against known risks. If a promise turns out to be wrong, the buyer can claim against you, which is why part of the price is often held back. The scope and the time limits are negotiated, and they are worth negotiating properly.

You sell the building to a property investor and the business continues to operate from it under a lease. It releases the value of the property while the trade carries on, and it changes what the trading business is worth to an operator, because they now inherit a rent. It suits some situations and quietly damages others.

It depends on how the deal is structured, how you hold the business, and the rules in force when you complete. Reliefs exist for business owners, they carry conditions about how long you have held the shares and what your involvement has been, and both the rates and the limits have changed repeatedly in recent years. We will not quote you a number, and you should be wary of anyone who does without seeing your position.

Before you go to market, not after you have an offer. Several of the arrangements that reduce a tax bill need to have been in place for a period beforehand, so they are simply unavailable to an owner who starts thinking about it once the deal is agreed. This is the cheapest professional advice in the whole process and the most commonly taken too late.

Substantially. A share sale, an asset sale, a partial sale, an earn-out and a sale of the property are all taxed differently, and the difference can exceed the difference between two competing offers. We work alongside your accountant so the structure is chosen with the tax position visible rather than discovered afterwards.

No. We are M&A advisers, not accountants or tax advisers, and we will tell you plainly when a question needs one. What we do is make sure the question gets asked at a point where the answer can still change what you do.

Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. We build the target list from our own data on the sector, approach owners directly on your behalf, qualify who is genuinely willing to talk, then run the valuation, the offer, the checking stage and the negotiation through to completion.

Because the businesses openly for sale are the ones every other buyer is also looking at, and competition works against you when you are buying. Approaching owners who have not yet decided to sell is slower, and it is how you find businesses at a sensible price with no auction attached.

No, though it changes what you need from an adviser. First-time buyers usually need more help on funding and on knowing which risks are normal and which are not. What matters most is whether the deal is fundable and whether you can run the business once you own it, and both are worth testing before you fall in love with a target.

A retainer for the search and a success fee on completion, agreed in writing before any work begins. We will walk you through the detail plainly, and the conversation before you appoint us costs nothing.

Your first conversation with a partner and a full valuation of your business are free. If you decide to sell with us, there is a fixed fee of £3,495 when you instruct us and a success fee of 4% of the sale price when the sale completes, with a minimum of £5,000, plus VAT. Smaller businesses, including single-practitioner clinics, are quoted a lower upfront fee, and the full picture is on our fees page.

The same job at different scales. A broker and an adviser both prepare a business for sale, find the buyers, run the offers and see the deal through to the money arriving; the label tends to follow the size of the deal. Stone & Co is a specialist healthcare broker and adviser, and whatever the size of your business the work is the same: preparation, a direct approach to the right buyers, competition between them and a partner on the deal to completion.

Outreach is anonymous until a confidentiality agreement is signed, information is released in stages with the most sensitive material gated behind further commitments, and we never market a business publicly without your explicit consent.

Healthcare is all we do. Stone & Co is a brokerage firm specialising entirely in healthcare, and residential and domiciliary care forms the basis of everything we do, with dental practices and aesthetic clinics alongside. If your business sits outside healthcare, we will say so on the first call and introduce you to one of the established M&A firms we work alongside in other sectors.

They work on volume and we work on service. Our data covers the active buyers in the sector including the ones who never watch the marketplaces, we approach them directly, and we take on a handful of clients at a time so that the partner you meet first is the person still there on completion day.

A phone call, nothing to prepare, and no obligation. Most of them end with an honest view of what the business might be worth and what would need to change to improve that, and a fair number of them end with us saying that now is not the moment. Nobody is charged for any of it.