Raising profit and making the business run without you.

We start with you rather than the business: when you would like to sell, the sum you need, and what matters to you personally, such as the future of your engineers and officers or a role after the sale.

Where there is more than one shareholder, the workshop is often the first time everyone says this out loud in the same room. Agreeing it early matters, because it decides which buyers suit you and how much time there is to work on the value.

Buyers price on what a business earns, and on how steady those earnings look. A firm that earns more with the same team is worth more to them than one that is simply busier.

So we look at how good and how steady your profit is, how much of your income repeats each year through monitoring, maintenance and guarding contracts, and how your work is mixed between systems and guarding. Each of these moves what a buyer will pay, and each can be changed over two to five years.

Different buyers want different things. A regional competitor may want your engineers and your contracts. An investor-backed group building a larger business may be buying for a monitoring book, accredited capability or a new region.

We go through what trade buyers, firms already in the same line of work, and investors building larger groups, tend to examine first, so the plan works on the things the likely buyers of your business will actually test, rather than on everything at once.

If you hold the key client relationships, price the work and still answer the alarm line out of hours, a buyer is really buying your time.

The workshop looks at how to make the business less dependent on the owners and on one or two key people: an operations manager or senior engineer who holds client relationships, someone other than you who can deal with alarm activations and escalations, and routines written down so they do not live in your head. These changes take time to show, which is why they come early.

Not all growth helps a sale. A year of extra installations can raise turnover and leave profit, and next year's income, much where it was.

We look at the steps that raise profit and make it steadier: pricing, the mix of jobs, costs that have crept up, guarding contracts that no longer pay their way, and winning more of the monitored systems, maintenance and commercial contract work buyers value. The aim is growth a buyer can see in the accounts, not just a busier diary.

A buyer looks hard at who delivers the contracts. The work can cover formal contracts, a training matrix, an SIA licence register and BS 7858 screening records for every member of staff, and SIA approved contractor status and NSI or SSAIB approval kept current, so the business does not rest on you alone.

A buyer will also ask about pay set against the market, and about any engineer or manager close to retirement, because they want to know who stays and why.

A sale to a trade buyer is not the only route. Some owners sell to an investor-backed group, some to their managers, and some to an employee ownership trust. Each route suits different owners and is taxed differently, so we look at which ones fit what you want before the plan is set.

We do not give tax or legal advice. Where a route needs it, we will say so and work alongside your own accountant and solicitor.

The workshop works best with every shareholder present, and with any senior managers you want involved. Hearing a buyer's view together tends to settle questions that would otherwise drag on, such as who will run the business after you and what each shareholder needs from the sale.

Before you book, we suggest who should attend and when to hold it.

The workshop ends in a written plan: the priorities in order and the agreed actions, with who does what and by when. It may look 12 to 36 months ahead.

That planning horizon is separate from the Reads Pre-Sale Programme, which runs 12 to 24 months, priced to your plan, paid monthly if you want us working alongside you on the plan. Each step stands on its own, so you can also take the plan away and deliver it yourselves.