In a 24 hour news society the constant restatement of “doom and gloom” can make business owners jittery and in my experience, disproportionately pessimistic. Clearly we are experiencing some transfer of the credit crunch impact on banking to the real economy.
And inevitably journalists and the media pounce on this information since it makes a good story. Here at BCMS Corporate, we assess the impact of the financial situation in what we consider to be a much calmer and measured way. At this point in time we have not seen any decline in the number of business owners planning to sell their businesses. In fact, we currently have as many clients this year as we had in the same period last year. Crucially, this has also been matched by record levels of strategically motivated acquirers. At the time of writing we have 43 client companies at accepted offer stage who are now entering the closing phase of the sale process.
Further afield our operations in the USA continue to grow very strongly and we are about to open a new office in Texas.
All in all our own experience is that the smaller and medium-sized business sale marketplace is far more positive than many would paint it.
Brian Rebbettes, Chairman
