If This Is the Year: The Sequence a Security Sale Follows

What actually happens, in order

First, a baseline. What the firm would fetch on today's figures, built from adjusted earnings, the recurring share of revenue, the contract book and the certification position. This is private work, it involves nobody outside the room, and it exists to tell you whether the rest of the sequence is worth starting this year.

Second, preparation. The contract schedule, the licence and vetting file, the adjustments note, and whatever specific issue the baseline surfaced, which in this sector is most often owner dependence, too much of the business resting on you, or a tail of accounts on old signalling paths. This is the stage that moves the number, and it is the stage owners are most tempted to skip.

Third, the approach. A small number of buyers who can actually acquire a certificated security business are approached on a no-names basis, and the ones who engage sign a non-disclosure agreement, a written promise to keep what they learn confidential, before they see anything identifying. Fourth, offers, which is where having more than one interested party stops being a preference and starts being the whole point.

Fifth, heads of terms, the short document that fixes price, structure and exclusivity. Exclusivity is the period in which you agree not to talk to other buyers. Sixth, diligence, the buyer's detailed checks: financial, legal, and in this sector a specific examination of licensing, vetting, contracts and the state of the monitoring base. Seventh, completion, and the beginning of whatever handover was agreed at stage five.

Honest timings for each stage

The baseline takes days rather than weeks once the figures are available. Preparation is the variable one: anything from a fortnight for a business that already keeps good records to twelve months where a full trading year needs to be presented differently or a management layer needs building.

The approach and offer stages typically run six to ten weeks in this sector. Buyers move faster than owners expect when the information pack is complete and slower than anybody expects when it is not, and the difference is almost entirely down to what was done at stage two.

Heads of terms to completion is where the timetable is least under your control. Two to four months is normal, and diligence on a security business has specific features that stretch it: vetting packs sampled individually, contracts read line by line, certification scope confirmed with the scheme, and TUPE questions, about officers moving across on their existing terms, where a guarding book is involved.

Added together, five to nine months from decision to money is the honest range for a prepared business, and longer where the preparation happens after the decision rather than before it. Anybody quoting materially less than that is describing a deal with one buyer, which is a different thing from a sale.

What would make this the year rather than next

Two dated changes are worth having in view while the timetable is set. Business Asset Disposal Relief, a lower tax rate on the gain for owners selling a business they run, charged 14% in the 2025/26 tax year and has charged 18% since Apr 2026, against a lifetime limit of £1m and a main rate of 24%. Separately, from April 2026 the first £2.5m of combined business and agricultural assets attracts full inheritance tax relief, with 50% relief above that, the allowance transferable between spouses and civil partners.

The second of those matters to owners for whom selling up had never been a tax question in the first place. An estate holding a business worth more than the allowance now carries an inheritance tax cost to keeping it until death, which for some families changes the arithmetic of holding on. That is a conversation for your own tax adviser rather than for an article, and it is the right time to be having it.

Neither is a reason to put an unprepared business in front of buyers. What they are is a reason to establish the baseline now rather than in October, because every option after that depends on knowing the number, and every option takes longer than it sounds.

The question I would actually ask in January is narrower than whether this is the year. It is whether the business, as it stands today, would survive being looked at closely by somebody with no reason to be generous about it. If the answer is yes, the timetable is yours to choose. If the answer is not yet, the gap between now and yes is the real project, and it is almost always shorter than owners fear and longer than they hope.

For owners with a few years in hand, the Reads Pre-Sale Programme sets out what to prepare and when.