The business the owner bought without knowing what he'd bought
I was brought into a national waste-management business just after it had been bought out of distress. It is the kind of business that looks simple from the outside and turns out to be anything but once you are in the accounts.
The situation I walked into
The business had lost its leader. The founder had built it up over years and then died, and it passed to a family member who had no interest in running it and understandably wanted out. By the time a new owner bought it, cheaply, mostly for the value of its equipment, it had been drifting for a while: revenue sliding, cash not being collected, and no real sales activity.
None of that is a failing on anyone's part. It is what happens to a business when the person who held it in their head is suddenly gone and nobody has stepped into the gap. But it meant the new owner had bought something without a clear picture of what was actually inside it. The contracts had not been read. The numbers had not been tested. So the first job was not to run the business, it was to find out what the business really was.
What I did
I became the due diligence that had not been done. I took two years of bank transactions and a warehouse of paper invoices and matched them line by line, rebuilding the real accounts from source: what actually came in, what actually went out, month by month, client by client.
Within a day, the biggest problem showed up. The owner believed he had bought a business locked in on long-term contracts. In fact, only the customers with equipment on site were contracted. Around half the revenue was ad-hoc, informal, rolling monthly, lapsed, able to walk out the door at any time with nothing to hold it. The business was not as solid as its top line made it look.
So I worked through it in order:
- Secured the revenue. I built a proper standard contract, tightened with a solicitor, that the sales team could sign a customer up on in the room, so the loose half of the business could be turned into something that stayed.
- Found the true profit on every client. I spread the real overheads across the customer base to see the actual margin on each account. That surfaced revenue that only looked like income, one client was £20k a year with no margin left after the cost of servicing it. I dropped accounts like that to protect the ones that mattered.
- Chased the cash back in. Debtors were sitting at 180 days. I re-introduced the business to its customers and collected against terms that now had something behind them.
- Sorted the assets. I got the equipment back under the business's own control, where its condition and value could actually be relied on.
The outcome
Inside about five months, the business went from loss-making to roughly £100k in profit, with real cash in the bank. Not by selling harder, but by reading what was actually there, securing what was loose, cutting what was costing more than it earned, and collecting what it was owed.
What it means for you, whether you sell or not
The pattern here is not unusual, and it is not really about waste management. A lot of businesses carry revenue that looks more secure than it is, clients that feel profitable but are not once you cost them properly, and cash they are owed but are not chasing. The numbers exist. They are just not telling the owner the truth.
If you are thinking about selling or stepping back, this is exactly the stuff a buyer's due diligence is built to find, and it is far better you find it first: a buyer is not paying for the effort that went in, they are paying for future cashflow and how little risk is attached to it. And if you are not selling at all, the same work simply makes the business steadier, more profitable and lighter to own. The list is the same either way.
The Ratio Check is a free, five-minute read on where your numbers, contracts and cash actually stand, and it is the best place to start.