Do SIA licences transfer with the business?

Licences are held by individuals rather than by the company, so nothing transfers in the way an asset does. What passes to the buyer is the workforce and the administration that keeps their licences current. A tracked register with renewal dates ahead of expiry is the evidence that the administration works.

How closely do buyers look at BS 7858 vetting records?

Closely, and by sampling rather than by summary. A buyer typically takes a handful of names from the payroll and asks to see the full screening pack for each one. What it is testing is consistency rather than perfection. Incomplete packs are treated as a risk carried into new ownership, and they tend to be resolved through a price retention or a seller warranty rather than through discussion.

Does high officer turnover reduce what a guarding business is worth?

It does, because a buyer is pricing the likelihood that contracts are still being serviced properly a year after completion. Turnover at or below the trade norm, evidenced over several years, supports a stronger position than an assurance that the team is settled.

What workforce records should I be keeping now?

A live licence register with expiry dates, complete BS 7858 packs filed by individual, average length of service, annual turnover, and a note of which supervisors were promoted from within. Keeping those five current takes very little time. Reconstructing them under diligence pressure takes weeks and rarely produces a flattering picture.

Licences, Vetting and the Workforce a Buyer Inherits

An SIA licence is a personal permission, not a company asset

The licence belongs to the individual, not to the firm that deploys them. That single fact shapes how a buyer thinks about a guarding workforce, because none of it comes with the company in the way a vehicle or a contract does. What comes with the company is the relationship with the people who hold the licences, and the systems that keep those licences current.

So the register matters more than the headcount. Who holds which licence, in which sector, expiring when. An owner who can produce that as a live document, with renewal dates tracked ahead of time, is demonstrating something a buyer cannot see any other way: that the operation does not periodically discover a lapsed licence on a Friday afternoon.

The Approved Contractor Scheme sits above this as the company-level answer. It says the business is audited against the standards the regulator expects of an approved contractor, which is a different claim from every officer being licensed, and buyers acquiring guarding books treat the two as separate questions.

There is a second-order effect owners rarely price. A firm that lets licensing administration drift also tends to be a firm whose client contracts, vetting packs and service records have drifted, and a buyer that finds one of those usually goes looking for the others.

BS 7858 is the file a buyer samples

Screening to BS 7858 is what a client is really buying when it puts a security contract out. It covers identity, employment history, references and the checks that sit behind them, and it is the promise underneath the promise: not merely that somebody will be at the gate, but that the somebody was checked before being sent.

In diligence, the buyer's detailed checks before committing, this file gets sampled rather than summarised. A buyer takes a handful of names from the payroll and asks to see the screening pack for each. What it is looking for is not perfection but consistency, because a file that is complete for twenty people and thin for three tells the buyer exactly how the process runs when the rota is short.

Gaps are rarely fatal and almost never free. They are usually handled by holding back part of the price for a period (a retention) or by a warranty the seller would rather not give, a statement in the sale contract that the buyer can claim on if it proves untrue, and both outcomes cost more than the afternoon it would have taken to close the gaps before anybody asked.

A vetting file that is complete for twenty people and thin for three tells a buyer how the process runs when the rota is short.

A retained team is the part hardest to replace

Officer turnover in guarding is high across the trade, and every owner knows the cost of it in overtime and in clients noticing new faces. What is less widely understood is how directly it feeds a valuation. A buyer pricing a contract book is really pricing the probability that the contracts are still being serviced properly in twelve months, and that probability is a function of who stays.

The same applies on the systems side for different reasons. An engineer who has maintained a site for nine years carries knowledge about that installation which exists nowhere else, and a buyer that loses three of those in the first quarter after completion has bought a maintenance base it cannot service to the standard the contracts assume.

None of this means an owner should promise a buyer that nobody will leave. It means the retention record is worth keeping and worth presenting: average length of service, turnover by year, how many of the supervisors were promoted internally. Those numbers are unglamorous and they answer the question a buyer is actually asking.

Where turnover is genuinely high, and in guarding it often is, the useful comparison is not with an ideal but with the trade. An operation running below the sector norm, and able to show it across three years, is making a stronger argument than one insisting the team is settled.

Your Team Is the Asset

Licensing and vetting records carry more weight than most owners expect. A short conversation will tell you how much weight yours would carry.

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For the stages of a sale, from the first confidential approach to completion, see how Simon Read runs a sale.