How much does owner dependence reduce the price of an FM business?

There is no fixed figure, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What it reliably changes is deal structure: a longer handover period, a larger share of the price deferred, and earn-out targets tied to the contracts you personally hold. Owners often feel that shift more than they would have felt a smaller headline number.

Can I fix this in a year?

Most of it, yes. Moving client relationships to named managers, documenting the pricing basis and handing bid writing to somebody else are each ordinary management tasks rather than projects, and twelve months is enough to establish a track record a buyer can see.

Should I tell my managers I am thinking about selling?

Not yet, and there is no need to. Everything described here is good management on its own terms and can be introduced as exactly that, which is also more honest than it sounds, because a business that runs without the owner is a better business whether or not it is ever sold. The conversation about a sale comes much later, at a point when there is something concrete to say.

What if my managers leave after the sale?

It is the buyer's central worry, which is why it shapes the structure. Expect retention arrangements for key managers, and expect the buyer to want to meet them before completion. A manager given real authority two years before a sale is also considerably more likely to stay through one.

The Estate You Run and the Business You Own: December Questions

The TestWhat the shutdown fortnight actually tests

Facilities management does not stop over Christmas. Buildings still need security, plant still fails, and the sites that empty out are exactly the ones where deep cleans and statutory works are scheduled. What changes is that the owner is usually not there, and that is the test.

Watch what reaches you anyway. A call about a client complaint, an approval for an out-of-hours callout, a question about whether a subcontractor can be paid early, a supervisor asking what to do about a no-show. Each of those is a decision the business could not make without you, and every one of them is something a buyer will eventually have to replace.

Then watch what does not reach you, because that is the encouraging half. Contracts that ran, clients who called their contract manager rather than your mobile, invoices that went out on time. The gap between the two lists is the honest picture of how transferable the business currently is.

Whatever happens while you are away over Christmas is roughly what a buyer would inherit.

The DependencyThe three dependencies specific to facilities management

The first is the client relationship held personally. In FM the relationship is often with an estates director or a managing agent who has known you for fifteen years, and who renewed last time partly because of that. A buyer has to assume a proportion of those relationships will not survive the transition, and the proportion they assume is higher when there is nobody else the client knows by name.

The second is pricing. Many owner-managed FM businesses price from experience rather than from a model: you know what a site costs to clean because you have costed forty of them. That knowledge is genuinely valuable and it is also entirely undocumented, which means the business cannot bid without you. Writing down the model, even roughly, converts an instinct into an asset.

The third is the bid itself. If every tender submission is written by the owner in the evenings, then the business's ability to win work walks out of the door on completion day. Buyers know this, and it is one of the few weaknesses they will name openly in negotiation rather than simply pricing in silence.

None of these is unusual and none of them is a criticism. They are the natural result of building something yourself. They are also each fixable in twelve to eighteen months, which is why December is a useful month to notice them.

The RemedyWhat a handover-ready FM business looks like

A named account owner for every client who is not you, introduced deliberately and given the authority to decide things. Authority is the part that gets skipped: a contract manager who has to ask you before agreeing a variation has a title rather than a role, and clients work that out quickly.

A documented pricing basis, held somewhere other than your head. It does not need to be sophisticated. Labour rates by role and region, productivity assumptions, materials and consumables, overhead recovery, target margin by service line: that is enough to let somebody else produce a defensible bid and enough to show a buyer the business can keep winning work.

Operational data in a system rather than in people. A CAFM platform holding the asset registers, the schedules, the job history and the completion evidence makes the business legible to somebody who has never visited a site, and legibility is most of what makes diligence quick. The same data also shortens the argument about what the business is worth, because the buyer can test your claims themselves rather than discounting them for uncertainty.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If the fortnight over Christmas raised the question, the valuation page will give you a confidential range to think about in January.

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