How long does it take to sell a facilities management business?

Six to nine months between an approach and the money arriving is typical, and twelve is not unusual. Add three to twelve months of preparation before that if the business has not been made ready, which is where most of the eventual price is actually decided.

What can I do now without anybody finding out?

All of the preparation. A baseline valuation, the contract register, the adjusted EBITDA workings, the employee schedule, reading your own change of control clauses and moving client relationships to named managers are internal tasks that look like ordinary management from the outside. Nothing becomes visible until a buyer is approached, and even then it is done under a blind profile and an NDA.

Should I rush to complete before the rate changes in April?

Almost never. A compressed process narrows the buyer pool and signals urgency, and both cost more than the rate difference. Sell when the business is ready and take timing advice from your own adviser once terms are in sight. The rate applies to the gain; a weak process applies to the whole consideration.

Do I need to tell clients before completion?

It depends on your contracts. Many FM agreements require notice or consent on a change of control, and a share sale may avoid triggering the clause where an asset sale would not. The practical answer is to read the clauses early, decide with your adviser which clients need a conversation and when, and plan the order of telling rather than improvising it.

If This Is the Year: The Sequence an FM Sale Follows

The OrderThe sequence, with timings that are not optimistic

It starts with a baseline valuation, which takes days rather than weeks and is entirely private. It tells you whether the rest of this is worth doing at all, and it gives you a figure to measure preparation against. A great many owners get this far, find the answer is roughly what they hoped, and take another two years deliberately rather than accidentally.

Preparation is the long part and it is where the money is made: three to twelve months depending on what the baseline found. Contract register, adjusted EBITDA workings with evidence, people records reconciled to contracts, concentration understood, and the owner dependency reduced to something a buyer can price. Nothing here involves telling a client or a competitor anything.

Then the market phase. An information memorandum and a blind profile, a considered approach list rather than an advertisement, NDAs, meetings, and offers. Six to twelve weeks for a well-run process, and the length depends more on how many buyers you want in the room than on anything else.

Heads of terms, then diligence, then completion. Diligence on a facilities management business runs eight to sixteen weeks because somebody is reading every contract and reconciling a payroll against it. Legal work runs alongside it. The whole path runs commonly to six or nine months, and twelve happens often enough not to be a surprise.

The FrictionThe two places FM deals lose weeks

Change of control consents are the first. A large share of FM contracts require the client to be told, or to agree, if the supplier changes hands, and in public sector and managing agent agreements that requirement is close to standard. On a share sale the question often does not arise, which is one reason share sales dominate, but where consent is required you are dependent on a client's own approval timetable and that timetable does not care about your completion date. Read your contracts for this clause in January, not in July.

People data is the second. Buyers ask for an employee schedule tied to contracts: who is assigned where, on which terms, with what length of service, and what came across with each contract win. Businesses that have kept a file per mobilisation produce it in a week. Businesses that have not spend a month rebuilding it from payroll exports and memory, usually at the point in the process when momentum matters most.

Neither of these is a reason not to sell. Both are reasons to start the unglamorous half now, because both are entirely solvable from your own desk and neither requires anybody outside the business to know anything.

Read your contracts for the change of control clause in January, not in July.

The DateWhat the April change does and does not justify

A process starting this month will not complete before April. Business Asset Disposal Relief has been 14% since 6 April 2025 and rises to 18% on 6 April 2026, and the completion date governs the rate, so a sale begun in January is realistically a sale taxed at the later rate.

That is worth saying plainly because the alternative advice is worse. Compressing a facilities management sale into a quarter to land ahead of a tax date means a shorter approach list, less time to fix what the baseline found, and a buyer who knows exactly why you are in a hurry. The price effect of that is routinely larger than the rate difference, and it is paid on the whole consideration rather than on the gain above the reliefs.

The sound plan is the ordinary one. Prepare properly, go to market when the business is ready, take advice on timing from your own accountant when heads of terms are in sight, and treat the rate as one input among several rather than as the schedule.

First Step, Not the Last

A baseline valuation is where the sequence in this article starts. It is confidential, it takes a few minutes, and nothing after it happens automatically.

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