Full Potential | M&A Advisory, Business Sales & Exit Planning

What’s your number?

Every business owner has one.

Every business owner has a number that makes the years of hard work, risk and sacrifice worthwhile. Full Potential helps you understand what your business could be worth today, what is holding it back, and what it could become worth with the right strategy and competitive sale process.

At Full Potential, we help you understand three numbers.

VALUE TODAY

What could your business realistically be worth in today’s market?

THE VALUE GAP

What’s currently preventing it from being worth more?

FULL POTENTIAL VALUE

What could the business potentially become worth with the right strategy?

Discover what your business could be worth

Discover. Build. Realise.

Don’t wait until you’re ready to sell.

The best time to start thinking about the value of your business isn’t six months before you want to exit. It’s years before.

Discover — understand what you’ve built.

We examine your business through the eyes of an acquirer: financial performance, revenue quality, management, customers, market, growth, risk and potential buyer universe. The result is a clearer understanding of what it could be worth today — and what could make it worth more.

Build — close the value gap.

Sometimes the best advice we can give an owner is: Don’t sell yet. If addressing a handful of issues over the next 12, 24 or 36 months could materially improve the outcome, we’d rather help you create that value first.

Increasing recurring revenue
Improving profitability
Reducing customer concentration
Strengthening the management team
Reducing dependence on you
Improving financial information
Creating a stronger growth story
Repositioning within your market

The objective isn’t simply to build a bigger company. It’s to build a more valuable one.

Realise — find the buyer who sees what you’ve built.

We identify the strategic acquirers, private equity investors, investment-backed businesses and other organisations with the strongest reason to value it. Then we create competition — because your company doesn’t have one fixed value. Its value depends partly on who is buying it, and why.

How we sell businesses

What makes your business valuable?

Profit gets you a valuation. Quality determines the multiple.

Imagine two businesses, both generating £2 million of EBITDA. One might be worth £10 million. The other might be worth £16 million. Why? Because buyers aren’t simply buying this year’s profit — they’re buying confidence in future profit.

This example is illustrative only and is not an expected outcome.

Recurring revenue

How predictable is tomorrow’s income?

Growth

How much bigger could this become?

Management

Can the company thrive without its founder?

Customers

How concentrated is the revenue?

Margins

How sustainable are they?

Market position & strategic fit

Why does it win — and what could it be worth inside the buyer’s organisation?

Understand your value gap

The Full Potential Review

What if your business is worth more than you think?

Before deciding whether to sell, understand what you’ve actually built. The Full Potential Review is our confidential assessment for established business owners. We examine:

Financial performance
Quality of earnings
Growth and margins
Recurring revenue
Customer concentration
Management strength
Founder dependency
Competitive position
Market activity
Recent transactions
Potential acquirers
Likely valuation

Then we answer three questions:

What is it worth today?
What could make it worth more?
How could we realise that value?

You don’t need to be ready to sell. In fact, we’d rather speak before you are.

Request your Full Potential Review

Confidential. No obligation.

Selling your business

Don’t simply find a buyer. Create a market.

There is an enormous difference between receiving an offer for your business and running a properly managed sale process. Our approach is research-led, discreet and competitive.

Prepare the business
Position the opportunity
Research the buyer universe
Identify the strongest strategic rationale
Approach buyers confidentially
Generate competitive tension
Manage offers and negotiate
Coordinate due diligence

We work alongside your legal, tax and other professional advisers through to completion. You continue running your company. We focus on realising its value.

Discuss selling your business

Why Full Potential?

Not another business broker.

We don’t want hundreds of businesses listed for sale, and we don’t believe an entrepreneur who has spent 20 years building a valuable company should feel like another listing. Full Potential works selectively with owners where we believe we can genuinely add value.

ENTREPRENEURIAL

Our advice comes from first-hand entrepreneurial experience. Michael understands what it feels like when the numbers on the spreadsheet represent years of your life.

EXPERIENCED

Our founder’s previous transaction experience includes leading the sale process on behalf of the shareholders in a £100m+ transaction recognised as Deal of the Year in 2021.

PERSONAL

You aren’t handed from salesperson to analyst to account manager. Michael is your main point of contact throughout.

RESEARCH-LED

We don’t wait for buyers to find your company. We identify the buyers with the strongest strategic reason to own it.

ALIGNED

Our job isn’t simply to complete a transaction. It’s to help you achieve the outcome that matters to you and the legacy you leave behind.

Who we work with

Successful businesses. Owners thinking about what comes next.

Full Potential advises founders, entrepreneurs and shareholders of established, profitable businesses. You may be:

Ready to sell now
Thinking about an exit in the next one to five years
Considering private equity
Planning succession
Looking to increase value before selling
Wondering what your company is worth
Dealing with an unsolicited approach from a buyer

“What would someone actually pay me for this?”

Perhaps you’re not thinking about selling at all. But if you’ve ever wondered that, it’s enough reason for us to talk.

We’ve done this before · The Heathcotes transaction

From founder-built business to Deal of the Year.

£100m+ transaction experience | Deal of the Year winnerInsider Sheffield City Region Dealmakers Awards 2021 · £10m+ category

Michael began advising Heathcotes and its shareholders in 2018. By March 2020, the shareholders had instructed him in relation to a sale of the specialist adult healthcare business. He marketed the business discreetly, identified the eventual buyers and led the sale process on behalf of the shareholders, working alongside the wider professional team. A £100m+ transaction involving Envivo Group and Civitas was agreed by the end of 2020. The transaction was recognised as Deal of the Year in the £10m+ category at the Insider Sheffield City Region Dealmakers Awards 2021.

A successful business sale starts long before you find the buyer. It starts with understanding the owner, the business, where its real value lies — and which buyer has the strongest reason to pay for it.

The award recognises a previous transaction on which Michael led the sale process on behalf of the shareholders while Managing Director of Milestone Financial Planning.

Meet Michael

Michael Heath

Entrepreneur. Adviser. Award-winning dealmaker.

Michael has spent his career building businesses, working with entrepreneurs and helping business owners navigate major financial and commercial decisions. His experience spans entrepreneurship, financial planning, corporate finance and M&A.

But transactions aren’t what originally interested Michael about business. Entrepreneurs are. The people who take the risk, employ the staff, sign the guarantees, wake up worrying about payroll — and spend years building something that eventually becomes worth far more than a salary could ever have created.

Understand the owner before trying to sell the company.

Full Potential was created to bring that philosophy to M&A.

Start a confidential conversation

For professional advisers

Your client’s business may be their biggest asset. Do they know what it’s worth?

We work alongside accountants, lawyers, wealth managers and other trusted advisers. We don’t seek to replace existing professional relationships — we add specialist M&A capability around them.

Through the Full Potential Review, your clients can understand their indicative valuation, potential value gap, exit readiness, likely buyer universe and what they could do now to improve their eventual outcome. If a transaction follows, we work collaboratively with the owner’s existing professional team.

Partner with Full Potential

For acquirers

Tell us what you want to buy.

Full Potential develops relationships with successful business owners before many formally decide to sell. If you’re a corporate acquirer, private equity investor, PE-backed platform, family office or acquisitive entrepreneur, we want to understand precisely what you’re looking for: sector, geography, revenue, EBITDA, business model, investment criteria and strategic rationale.

Because when we encounter the right company, we’ll know who should be having the conversation.

What’s your number?

You’ve spent years building your business. Perhaps decades.

At some point, you’ll have to decide what happens to it. You don’t need to make that decision today. But you should understand your options.

What is it worth? What could it be worth? And what would make you say yes?

Discover the Full Potential of what you’ve built. No obligation. No hard sell. Just a conversation about your business and what might be possible.