The Quieter Weeks: Summer Preparation for a Security Sale

What the summer is actually good for

Alarm activations fall, break-in patterns shift, contract renewals cluster elsewhere in the year, and half the client base is on holiday. For most owner-managed security firms that makes July and August the only weeks where somebody senior has time to look at the business rather than run it.

It is not a good window to take a business to market. Buyers are slower to respond, advisers are away, and a process that stalls in August loses its momentum in a way that is hard to recover. Starting in September against a prepared business is faster than starting in July against an unprepared one.

What the summer is good for is the unglamorous preparation that decides how a sale goes six or twelve months later. No decision has to be taken to begin any of it, and all of it makes the firm simpler to operate in the meantime, which is the only test of preparation worth applying.

There is a practical reason to use the gap rather than simply enjoy it. Anything that needs a full trading year to show properly, such as a revenue split separating recurring income from project work, has to be started before the year begins rather than after it ends. July is roughly the last point at which that is still a choice.

Three files that take an afternoon each

The contract schedule. Every account, what it covers, when it started, its term, its notice period, the current charge and the date of the last increase. Most owners have this information spread across an accounts package, a service system and somebody's memory. Pulled into one document it becomes the single most useful thing you own in a negotiation.

The workforce file. The SIA licence register with expiry dates, BS 7858 screening packs filed by individual, and a simple record of length of service. This is the file a buyer samples in diligence, its detailed check of your business, and assembling it in July is a different experience from assembling it while a buyer waits.

The adjustments note. Owner salary and how it compares with a market rate for the role, vehicles, any property arrangement, family on the payroll, one-off costs that will not recur. Write down the reason for each while the year is in front of you. A buyer will accept a documented adjustment far more readily than a remembered one.

Being ready before the nights draw in

From late September the pattern changes. Activations rise, response call-outs rise, temporary guarding requests arrive, and the operation moves at the pace it will hold until spring. That period is the annual proof of whether the business can carry its contract book, and it generates the evidence a buyer finds most persuasive.

The point of doing the preparation now is that the autumn then produces clean data rather than a scramble. If the contract schedule already exists, the winter simply updates it. If it does not, next summer is spent reconstructing a season nobody recorded properly.

It is also worth using a quiet fortnight to find out whether the business runs without you. Take the two weeks properly, leave the operations manager to it, and note what actually came back to you and what did not. That answer is worth more to a valuation than any document described above, and there is no other time of year when the experiment is cheap to run.

So the honest summer recommendation is modest. Three files, an afternoon each, no decision required. If a sale never happens they are still the documents that make the business easier to hand to an operations manager, insure, or borrow against.

Assembling the vetting file in July is a different experience from assembling it while a buyer waits.

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