Starting your own firm? Before you dream big, do the maths.

You are entertaining thoughts of starting your own business, and so at this stage, your thoughts are likely consumed by the complexities of leaving your current employer with your reputation and finances intact. A noble concern, certainly—but just one of many that should be keeping you up at night.

Let’s talk clients.

Some will follow you enthusiastically. Others will express regret, but stay put. A few will consider your departure a betrayal, as one memorably did to me. Clients are not sheep. Do not assume a stampede in your direction.
And new clients? They will arrive in fits and starts. Some will admire your team’s credentials. Others will associate “small and new” with “cheap and cheerful.” Which, if you’re not careful, is exactly how you’ll be treated.

One friend’s firm, launched with a sterling investment banking track record, found itself stuck in a Catch-22. The banks wanted to see a track record before hiring them. But they couldn’t build a track record without being hired. Reputation, it turns out, is not always enough.
The lesson? Optimism is fine, but prudence pays the rent. Set aside enough capital to weather a slow start and delayed payments. Because delay they will.
Your first year will be a golden window. Novelty buys you meetings, goodwill, curiosity. Use every moment to build. Because novelty fades—and then you’re just another small agency chasing the same work as everyone else.

Differentiate or die.

In a crowded market, being just another competent supplier makes you price-sensitive. And there will always be someone willing to undercut you. Stand for something—or get ready to race to the bottom.

Location matters more than LinkedIn will admit.

Yes, remote working exists. So do actual clients. If you plan to charge real fees, sooner or later, you’ll need to meet people. In person. In commercial hubs. Not on the edge of a National Park.
I live in Chichester—beautiful, historic, genteel. Also, economically sleepy. The commercial buzz of London it is not. PR firms in places like this tend to serve smaller clients, on smaller budgets, with generalist needs. Specialism—the thing that lets you charge more—becomes harder.

Funding: the grim reality.

Banks will lend you money. If you’re willing to put your house on the line. And if things go south, they won’t be shy about calling it in.
Most founders self-fund, or tap tolerant friends and family. When we launched Hogarth, we did it ourselves. That meant clarity: who’s in, who’s paying what, who gets what share, what we pay ourselves, and—critically—which clients might come with us.
A quick tip: assume even your friendliest clients will delay payment. Big companies excel at moving slowly.

And suppliers?

They won’t know you. Many won’t trust you. No credit history means you’ll pay upfront. We did. It hurt.
One exception: an office supplies company offered us 30-day terms. We rewarded them with a decade of loyalty. A rare bright spot in a cash-stretched start-up.

Office space: it gets expensive fast.

Yes, home offices are cheap. But they’re lonely, unimpressive, and no substitute for culture or credibility. Co-working can work—for a while. But sooner or later, you’ll need your own place.
And when you leave? Surprise! You might owe for dilapidations—returning that tired office to its original pristine state. Budget for carpets, partitions, paint.
Then come the extras: rent, rates, insurance, utilities, mysterious municipal levies. It adds up.

IT is now your problem.

No more helpdesk. Just you, a laptop, and Google. Buy decent kit. When I left Engine to start again, their IT head told me 90% of their problems came from PCs. We bought Macs.
You’ll need cloud backups, antivirus, mobile tech, and accounting software. Excel is not an accounting system. Use Xero, FreeAgent, or QuickBooks—and hire a real accountant.

Marketing: not optional.

Website. Branding. CRM. Travel. Entertainment. Networking. It all costs money—and all of it matters.

And staff?

Your biggest cost. And your biggest headache. Salaries, NI, pensions, healthcare. Recruiting is hard. Keeping people is harder. Your plans will change. Often.

So:

• Prepare a cash flow forecast.
• Be conservative.
• Plan for pain.
• Don’t mistake enthusiasm for readiness.

Twelve Lessons Worth Tattooing on Your Brain

1. Clients are unpredictable. Plan for a few to follow you—and more to stay behind.
2. Capital is your cushion. Optimism doesn’t pay rent.
3. Make year one count. The “new firm” buzz fades fast.
4. Differentiate or die. If you’re not distinct, you’re replaceable.
5. Location counts. Be near business, not just beauty.
6. Remote working is overstated. Real relationships need proximity.
7. Self-fund where possible. Banks have short memories and long contracts.
8. You have no credit. Suppliers want cash, not charm.
9. Budget for space properly. Offices are expensive—and deceptively so.
10. Tech isn’t optional. Buy smart. Plan ahead. Avoid cheap regrets.
11. Staffing will dominate your time and budget. And your sleep.
12. Everything takes longer. And costs more. And goes sideways.

Hope fuels the dream. But cash keeps the lights on. Plan for the setbacks, pad the budget, and assume nothing will go quite to plan. That way, when the curveballs come—and they will—you’re still in the game.

Productivity is an enormously important metric in evaluating just how good your marcomms business is, because it’s a measure of how highly the marketplace regards your firm.
Productivity is simply the marketplace voting with its wallet, which is why you should pay attention to it.  The higher the number, the more strategic and important an adviser you are considered by clients to be.

And in a world where clients are taking services in house more and more, and competitors are getting better and better (and new types of competitors are emerging all the time), you need to stay strategic and important, in order to stay ahead.

And if you are thinking of selling your business at some point, then you should know that productivity has a major impact on the multiple you are likely to receive, as it is a measure of quality.

To get the productivity number for your business, divide the year’s gross profit by the number of FTE people you employ. That includes freelancers, secretaries – everyone.

According to a recent MKS survey, the top performing business generated £271,851 productivity. Their clients think so highly of them, they are willing to pay almost £272K for every single person employed. That’s impressive.

So how does your firm measure up?

• Productivity >£200K means your business genuinely is top class;
• >£150K means your firm is doing really well;
• <£100K means your firm is offering generic services (and thus liable to price pressure from all the generic competitors out there);
• <£80K means you have a problem, no matter what your PR says to the contrary.

That’s why this is such an important metric:

• The number of awards you have is nice, but doesn’t reflect what the market thinks of you;
• The number of years you have been in business doesn’t tell you what the market thinks of you;
• Your own PR – we are market leaders, etc, etc – certainly is not an accurate reflection of what the market thinks;
• The number of eminent, experienced, well known people you employ doesn’t tell you what the market thinks of you;
• The number and prestige of your clients looks good, but says little about how important you are to each;
• Your profit margin says something about how you run the business, but little about the value you bring to clients.

So, how to boost productivity?

To be frank, for some it will be close to impossible.

• If you are serving a region that is under-performing economically, it will be hard to sell differentiated, expert services, because your clients can’t or won’t pay the fees.
• If you are serving a sector that doesn’t value communications and you are effectively outsourcing operations, not brains, it will be a real, hard, uphill struggle.
• If you are a brand new, tiny business, you will lack the necessary credibility (unless you are a high-profile exit from a firm with an outstanding reputation) to sell high-value services to the C-Suite.

So, assuming you are not in one of these categories, how to make the changes? It’s not something you can do in one fell swoop, but depending on the lifecycle of clients in your sector and the frequency with which opportunities appear, you should be able to make significant improvements in under a year.

High productivity means you are providing expert, high value-added services. So step one is to understand what valuable services your client wants and that they will be willing to pay for.

There are various ways to work this out. You might already know, because you are close to them and know them well. You could simply ask them what services they want that you are not providing (I used to ring all major clients, when I was a CEO, to ask them if (a) they were happy with our work (b) were we doing everything we could be. The answers give you an indication of gaps in your offer).

You could watch what other advisers were doing, and listen to client complaints, in case they stopped doing something the clients still wanted (this is how Valin Pollen started Investor Relations – observing the brokers moving out of the IR space and leaving an unfilled client need).

You might find out at the scoping stage of a relationship, if the placemat uncovers something.

You could observe competitors, to see what they were selling that you were not.

You could ask intermediaries.

You could brainstorm amongst your team.

You could look at startups selling something different (especially in digital, where the pace of innovation is very exciting), to see if you could learn from them.

You could look at your clients’ competitors, to see if they were doing something you could turn into a service.

These new services form part of your firm’s IP. But you can also look at your existing operational practices and see if you can improve them (using a similar process to that described above), to raise the quality and value of existing activities. Regester Larkin did this very effectively with their M&A work, for example.

One defining feature of experts is that they know more than non-experts. So you could increase your chances of creating high-value services by continually improving your understanding of the techniques and principles that could have a bearing on client work (think yourself sufficiently expert already? Then what are Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion, including the new one? If you don’t know the answer, then I respectfully suggest you are less expert than you imagine).

I find the output of McKinsey, Bain et al offer thoughts that, with some imagination, might have application in our spheres of activity. McKinsey’s work on the present day customer buying journey, for example, might give you insights of value in the B2C arena.

Basically, you have to turn your knowledge of the client and sector, combined with your natural curiosity, into a determined effort to spot promising ideas, then try them out, before refining them and rolling them out commercially.

You need to upskill your staff, so that they can handle clients in the C-Suite the new services will expose you to. In that hackneyed – but accurate term – they need to become Trusted Advisers, which is some way beyond the client handling skills needed for less valuable work.

Lastly, make sure that your operation is as efficient as possible, as waste won’t help you. That means having an effective marketing and BD process that focuses on the type of high-value clients you seek (and if you are really expert, you should be winning >75% of all pitches). You should understand what the most and least profitable services / operations are that you offer, so you know where to invest in the future. And – that old chestnut – you need to make sure your staff utilisation is at an acceptable level.

I’m often told it is to do with firing staff, or parting ways with a co-founder. Or maybe it’s taking the difficult decision to fire a client, or decline a re-pitch? Or deciding whether or not to sell?

Nope. The hardest decision – and the most consequential – is to decide on your commercial strategy, by which I mean:

• Deciding which segment(s) of the market to serve
• With what distinctive, valuable specialisation
• Delivered in what way

Too many people fall into the trap of thinking that if they keep their offer broad, they will have a much wider base of potential clients to go after, and have a much broader range of services to offer.

Trouble is, if you do that, you immediately have a much broader base of competitors to deal with, and the broad range of services starts to look generic in the eyes of a client.

Truth is, there are thousands of marcomms businesses out there, all claiming to be better and different, but who are basically offering pretty much the same.

And if you are a client faced with a large number of competing businesses, offering generic-ish services, the rational way to choose between them is on price. And there will always be someone out there, desperate to sell and so happy to undercut you. Before you know it, you are locked into a spiral of decline.

But even if you have thought about it and made the decision to specialise; you have thought about where to compete and how to deliver the service, it doesn’t stop there.

You have to keep improving your offer and how you deliver it. You have to keep adjusting your commercial strategy as the commercial world evolves; what was a distinctive niche today may be evaporating tomorrow. The search for a great commercial strategy never ends.

So if you haven’t yet taken the decision on where you are going to compete, with which distinctive (and valuable) offer(s), delivered in what way, better get started.

How to do this? Well, in simple terms:

Work out which of your market segment(s) look like they offer the best returns (it’s always easiest to start with segments you already know, than taking a flying leap into an area you know little about). Which has the deepest pockets? Which has the greatest growth opportunities? Any offer barriers to entry?

Next,

1. Work out what it is your firm does best; that clients think is really good; where you know you are better than your competitors. There must besomething…
2. Work out what services your clients value most, whether delivered by you or someone else. Quickest way to do this is to speak to them.

Think about how you can marry these two together. Then look around and see how others – maybe folks outside of the immediate marcomms arena – are providing these or similar services, only better. Crib from what they do (I have found the output of the big management consultancies really helpful here, in topics as diverse as the customer purchase journey, and change management) in order to make your operations even better. Frankly, there is a continuous process of improvement.

And finally, you have to decide how to deliver your services. Think small operational matters (e.g. doing away with contact reports and moving to real-time, on-line project status apps) as well as the big ones (e.g. Partner-led services, or highly leveraged services using juniors).

I say finally, but there’s one more step, which is to phase out – ie terminate – the generic stuff you currently offer. Big bang is not good here, but you do eventually have to shed the stuff that clouds your commercial positioning. That’s painful, but there’s no way around it.

This takes time and will give you many a headache. But if you don’t make the decision – the hard decision – about where you are going to be distinctive and offer high value services, the market will eventually decide your fate for you.

The Business of Test Drives

So, you have created a promising pipeline of prospects; people who align with your commercial strategy and have, at least, a passing interest in what you offer. The next challenge is to warm them up further, nudging them from mildly intrigued to seriously interested.

One of the most effective ways to do this is through experiential marketing, otherwise known as getting them to an event. The principle is simple, but it used far less often than it should be: let them experience your firm in action.

Think of it as the corporate equivalent of a test drive. A prospect can read all the reviews, consume all your thought leadership papers, watch the promotional videos, and listen to a slick pitch, but none of these are as convincing as getting behind the wheel.

To illustrate the point, consider a personal anecdote. Many years ago, when I was just starting out as a motorcyclist, I strolled into a Honda dealership to inquire about a test ride. They declined, on the grounds that I lacked experience. So I went to BMW’s Park Lane showroom instead, where they promptly handed me the keys to a top-of-the-range touring bike, for the entire weekend. I am now on my sixth BMW.

The lesson? Experience builds commitment in a way that marketing materials simply cannot.

A well-run event serves the same function. It allows prospective clients to:

• Meet you and selected colleagues
• Hear what you have to say – thus providing evidence of your expertise
• And, critically, see that you are competent and pleasant human beings.

This final point should not be underestimated. Clients, particularly in professional services, want to work with people they like. An event is an opportunity to demonstrate both expertise and basic decency which, in many industries, is enough to set you apart.

They can also see the company that you keep, and if you have a high-quality guest list, that could be helpful.

So, if you want to turn warm-ish prospects into hot ones, get them into the showroom and hand them the keys.

The process for effective events is simple:

• Pick a topic your audience cares about (see below)
• Gather material (research, interviews, or analysis).
• Compile a compelling report or white paper.
• Share your insights—via LinkedIn, newsletters, and direct outreach.
• Host an event—breakfast briefing, panel discussion, webinar, etc
• Follow up—not with a hard sell, just a conversation.
• Repeat… endlessly.

Events come in all shapes and sizes. Some, like JFDI’s annual New Business Barometer research (something I highly recommend), involve a few hundred people and an unveiling of industry research. Others, like breakfast workshops for 6-10 people, are more low-key but highly targeted. Both approaches work.

Other possibilities:

• Panel discussions (good if you can attract a heavyweight speaker).
• Breakfast/lunch/dinner roundtables (clients enjoy eating).
• Conferences (either hosting or speaking at them).
• Small, curated networking gatherings

Lunchtime webinars with live Q&A to supplement in-person events are also worth considering, especially if you are dealing with folks in different time zones, as you can record them and make them available, later.

You can also boost your media credentials at the same time as impressing would-be clients, by publish a series of papers, written by journalists with you topping and tailing them, aimed at the concerns of very large potential clients. You would hold invitation-only (ie no substitutions) dinners to discuss these. We commissioned the a former editor of the FT to do this for my old firm.

In terms of topics, I think they come in five flavours:

• Zeitgeist – matters that seem to have attracted widespread interest (e.g. AI panic)
• Evergreen issues – these are topics that are perpetually of concern (e.g. hiring woes)
• Emerging trends – this is one where you notice that a few clients have started to mention a new concern. Chances are, it’s something others may become interested in soon, too.
• Original insight – these are matters that your professionalism leads you to believe will be an issue, but others have not quite spotted it, yet.
• Piggybacking – this is where you notice something produced by someone else, and improve on it with your knowledge and make it your own (e.g. riffing off McKinsey’s latest industry thesis)

Whatever the format, the rules remain the same:

• Flawless execution—guests will judge you not just on content but on whether the IT works, whether the coffee arrives on time, and whether they feel looked after. If anything goes wrong, it will count against you (even if it wasn’t your fault).
• The topic must be compelling—if it isn’t, people won’t come.
• Crucially, your firm must actively contribute—simply organising an event is not enough. You should have a major, if not the major, speaking role.
• A good ratio is one in-house person per two guests, ensuring attendees meet enough of your team to get a feel for the firm. Clients should leave thinking, “These people know what they’re talking about and I liked them.”

The goal is not mass-market reach but high-quality engagement with the right audience. Done properly, marketing is not a cost—it is an investment. One that builds a predictable, scalable pipeline of new business.

Why treat one like the other?

Ask most agency owners if marketing is an investment or a cost, and they’ll nod wisely, say “investment”, then promptly treat it like a cost. This is an error. If you want a thriving PR business, you should expect to spend at least 4% of your gross profit on marketing and new business. That’s not a theoretical benchmark—it’s the minimum I’ve seen deliver results, and the annual jfdi/Opinium New Business Barometer will show you how your peers stack up.

Spend much less, and you risk drifting quietly into irrelevance. Spend much more, and you may be accused of trying too hard—though in practice, I’ve yet to see a firm fail because it over invested in new business.

When I scaled Shandwick Consultants, one of the earliest decisions was to boost marketing and business development spend from a token ~1% to something closer to 9%. That shift didn’t do the work alone, but it catalysed everything that followed.

So where should the money go?

Even modest-sized firms should be staging at least one event a month. August and December are excused due to holidays and festive inertia, but otherwise, there should be movement—a breakfast briefing, webinar, roundtable, or any event that maintains visibility and enables prospective clients to experience your business in some way. Larger firms? Every division should pull its weight. If a prospective client asks, “What’s your firm been up to lately?”, you should have an answer measured in activities, not awkward silences.

Then there’s social media. Activity here should be relentless but strategic. Share your content—sorry, intellectual property—and follow potential clients assiduously: digitally first, professionally later. Don’t be shy about advertising or entering awards. If two firms are otherwise equal, but one has a trophy cabinet and the other looks like it lost the three-legged race at school sports day, most clients will favour the winner.

And let’s not forget the soft power of hospitality. Clients, intermediaries, and future partners rarely entertain themselves. Budget for the coffees, lunches, and conferences—not to mention the speaking slots. And don’t scrimp on the CRM system. Without it, all this effort risks dissolving into a swirl of expensive but untraceable activity.

The real danger?

Not spending too much. Spending it badly.

Money evaporates via outsourced cold-callers or overcatered dinners where nobody remembers what anyone said. Marketing is, and must be, an investment. But like all investments, it requires intelligence—and a plan.

So: look at your management accounts.

If you’re spending less than ~4% on marketing and new business, what exactly are you doing to win clients?

An invaluable legal “just in case” document

Setting up a business partnership is rather like entering a marriage—replete with heady highs, inevitable lows, the occasional misunderstanding, and, predictably, a rocky patch. Hence, a Shareholder Agreement is not merely advisable—it’s indispensable.

If you find yourself among fellow shareholders (and not merely dallying with option holders), it’s high time to remedy any absence of such an agreement. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the interests of you and your principal co-conspirators, particularly in the context of a limited liability company—a structure your clients will likely insist upon. Essentially, it codifies the basics of operating your enterprise: when to consider a sale and how to shield yourself from the unsavoury antics of a partner engaging in dubious side deals, for instance.

Thanks for reading Start Grow Manage Sell! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Since every venture is apt to hit a rough patch, straining even the sturdiest of relationships, you must decide whether to design “divorce” to be a walk in the park or a bureaucratic slog. We opted for the latter—a deliberate choice to deter hasty, emotion-fuelled decisions, as enshrined in our own 57-page Hogarth Shareholder Agreement.

For your amusement—and perhaps enlightenment—here’s a summary of the topics it covers:

•  Designating the firm’s auditors, company secretary, and legal advisors;
•  Ensuring that all transactions are conducted at arm’s length;
•  Obligating the maintenance of various types of insurance;
•  Specifying the content and deadlines for monthly and annual accounts;
•  Safeguarding the corporate form and status of the business;
•  Defining the procedure for appointing new directors;
•  Imposing financial borrowing limits;
•  Setting restrictions on loans to directors;
•  Outlining directors’ remuneration;
•  Capping the value of contracts that any shareholder may enter on behalf of the firm;
•  Specifying the identity of the directors;
•  Detailing the mechanism for raising additional capital;
•  Regulating the transfer of shareholdings;
•  Prescribing the process for winding up the business;
•  Upholding the confidentiality of business information;
•  Empowering the company to enforce its rights against recalcitrant shareholders;
•  Stipulating non-compete arrangements; and
•  Determining the dates at which a sale—or “realisation”—of the firm might be contemplated.

Admittedly, the sheer scope of these provisions may seem daunting. Yet remember, this document is designed to protect you. In its absence, I have witnessed founders embroiled in disputes that are as stressful as they are unsavoury. By prioritising the creation of a robust Shareholder Agreement, you can sidestep such pitfalls and secure a smoother business journey.

In short, consider this a grown-up business document. Now, do yourself a favour and get on with it.

And one way to kill the deal

Having decided to sell your firm, you set about drafting the Information Memorandum. In doing so, you are struck by a revelation: the business you have built is not merely successful, it is a modern marvel — dazzlingly profitable, impeccably managed, and uniquely positioned. Buyers, you are sure, will engage in a vicious bidding war for the privilege of paying you a very handsome multiple.

Dream on.

The communications industry has a particular talent for believing its own propaganda. A little varnish is expected. Total intoxication is less advisable. Speaking as one who has succumbed to the same heady fumes, allow me to suggest three reliable ways to irritate, alienate, and ultimately repel your would-be suitors.

1. Hubris

There is a seductive notion that, despite its modest size, your firm is vastly superior to that of any potential purchaser — more agile, more creative, more brimming with talent. Indeed, you reason, the acquirer is not buying you so much as securing salvation for itself.

The buyers, inconveniently, may take a different view. Even if your firm is, in some limited respects, the better-run machine, sneering at their achievements is unlikely to smooth negotiations. However tempting it is to share your insights on their operational shortcomings, resist. You are wooing them as much as they are wooing you.

There is an opposite problem here too. Excessive modesty. Alastair Angus, the Founder and Chair of highly respected SI Global, mentioned to me that he had noticed some (relatively) smaller firms had less confidence in themselves than they had in their potential acquirers.

I think he has a really interesting point here, and when I think back to our sale, I can remember being ever so slightly in awe of the Engine Group. They had the storied ad agency WCRS at their heart and they were serial acquirers, whereas although Hogarth was a cracking business, I felt we were not in the same league as Engine.

Did this have an impact on our negotiations? I’m not sure. Certainly we managed to extract a really good deal, but I do now wonder if maybe a more assertive attitude might have made the deal better still?

I think the point here is to be aware of your attitude when approaching a sale (it’s a bit like a David firm pitching against a Goliath competitor – Goliaths are easily beaten by turning their hubris against them), and make sure you are neither arrogant or genuflective.

2. Delusional Pricing

A little ambition on price is understandable. Grandiosity is not. Vendors who enter negotiations demanding astronomical multiples — “Our business is worth 20x EBITDA!” — usually provoke the swift and brutal rejoinder: “Not to me.”

The outcome is predictable and painful: either the deal collapses amid acrimony, or you are forced into an undignified climbdown. Better, by far, to consult those with a grounding in market reality before pitching your expectations. Private equity buyers, trade acquirers, and corporate development officers alike have access to plentiful data on comparable transactions. So should you.

3. Discourtesy

It is perhaps a variant of playing hard-to-get: slow replies, casual slights, a general air of haughty disinterest. In practice, it reads less as strategy and more as simple rudeness.

Buyers are, by nature, suspicious creatures, trained to detect risk. A discourteous vendor sets off alarm bells. In an industry where even the most powerful figures deploy charm by the bucketload, bad manners suggest that something is seriously amiss.

By all means, be selective. Maintain your standards. But do so with grace, tact, and — that most underrated of lubricants — courtesy. It costs nothing, preserves options, and marks you out as a class act rather than a petulant amateur.

Selling a firm is a difficult, occasionally bruising business. Success comes to those who combine confidence with realism, firmness with politeness, and ambition with humility.

Finally, a brief note on how to torpedo your own sale — swiftly and without recourse.

Peter Hemington, a seasoned hand in the M&A trade, offers this advice: “the fastest way to kill a deal is to miss your numbers”.

In most sales, the buyer is not merely acquiring your past; they are paying a multiple of your projected profits. It is a transaction built on promises. Should you be forced, mid-process, to confess that you will not achieve the results you so confidently forecasted, you will achieve something else instead: a serious dent in the buyer’s confidence.

The deal may not collapse immediately — buyers are a patient lot — but any subsequent flaw uncovered in due diligence, however minor, will almost certainly finish it off. The credibility reservoir will have been drained.

The solution, predictably, lies not in eleventh-hour heroics but in habit. In the years preceding a sale, a business must develop a culture of hitting its budgets and forecasts — not occasionally, not optimistically, but as a matter of unremarkable routine.

Fictional budgets are a luxury only affordable when no one else’s money is on the line. By the time a sale looms, the cost of missing projections is existential.

Thus, if a sale is even a glimmer on your horizon, start now: sell numbers you can actually deliver. Buyers are quite happy to pay for growth — provided they can believe a word you say.

Summary: Selling Your Firm: How to Avoid Self-Sabotage

When it’s time to sell, your mindset, behaviour and realism matter as much as your numbers. Here’s how not to blow it:

1. Don’t Believe Your Own Hype

Confidence is good. Arrogance is fatal. Buyers don’t want to be patronised or told they’re lucky to have found you. Show respect, not superiority.

2. But Don’t Grovel Either

Feeling like the underdog? Fine. Acting like one? Fatal. Buyers want a partner, not a project. Stand tall and sell with self-belief.

3. Be Realistic on Price

Valuation fantasies kill deals. Ambition is fine — delusion is not. Get grounded in the market, and remember: the buyer defines the multiple, not your spreadsheet.

4. Don’t Play It Cool

Ignoring emails, turning up late, acting like you’re doing them a favour? That’s not mystery, that’s a red flag. Professional courtesy builds trust — and closes deals.

5. Hit Your Numbers

Miss your forecasts mid-process, and you’ll tank the deal. Buyers are buying your future — make sure it’s one they can believe in. Predictability beats potential every time.

Want to wreck your sale? Here’s the shortcut: act superior, price like a fantasist, treat buyers like peasants, and miss your targets.

Or… don’t. And sell like a pro.