My wife and I were past retirement age and considering selling our domiciliary live-in care agency. Over recent years we had received regular marketing material from you at Axis, and as you were located in the south east I made an initial call to you to establish how a sale would proceed. You gave me an indication of the sort of price we could expect to sell for and of the steps we should take to prepare for sale. We originally envisaged putting the company on the market next year. However, we were approached by a potential buyer in the summer of this year and rather than accept the first offer we decided to sell the business through a broker. In view of our earlier conversations we selected you to represent us.
Within a matter of weeks you had introduced and arranged meetings with at least three other potential buyers, and one meeting you attended as well. A low offer was rejected and another buyer thinking of putting in an even lower offer was put off by you. All went quiet over Christmas, but in the new year the last potential offeror re-emerged prepared to make a higher offer and two other potential buyers were introduced by you and Axis. You were able to engender a mini bidding war and all three parties ended up offering higher amounts than their original indications. Our acceptance of the lowest offer was driven by our assessment of the buyers’ credibility; and two months after completion we can already see that their increased spending on marketing and improving the way the business is run is yielding positive results.
Kate and Axis made all this possible.
Richard Hodgkinson