Asset and facilities management

Businesses that look after other people's assets

Infrastructure, plant, equipment, buildings. Work that has to happen whether or not anyone is paying attention to it, under contracts that renew for years because switching is more trouble than it is worth.

Why this work suits us

These are exactly the businesses our approach is built around. The work is essential rather than discretionary. The contracts are long. Clients renew because a competent incumbent who knows the estate is genuinely hard to replace, and everybody involved knows it.

They are also, almost without exception, run on systems that have not kept pace with the business. Scheduling lives partly in a system and mostly in one person's head. Job sheets come back on paper and get typed up. Compliance evidence is assembled by hand when somebody asks for it. Invoicing lags the work by weeks because reconciling what was done against what was quoted is somebody's least favourite afternoon.

None of that stops the business working. It has worked for twenty years. It does mean the firm carries far more administrative weight than it needs to, that the owner is usually the only person with the full picture, and that growth is limited by how much more the same people can absorb.

That combination, essential work with sticky contracts and unmodernised operations, is the clearest version of what we look for.

What we look for

Contracted or repeat revenue

Planned maintenance, service agreements, retained management contracts. Reactive and project work on top is welcome, but there should be a contracted base underneath it.

Clients who renew

Relationships measured in years, with renewal the default rather than a competitive event each time. Low client turnover tells us more than any margin figure.

A team that can run the work

Supervisors and managers who can deliver without the owner in every decision. If every quote and every scheduling call comes back to you, we should talk about what that means before anything else.

Work that is genuinely needed

Statutory inspection, safety critical maintenance, keeping an asset available. The best version is work a client cannot defer without a real consequence.

Manual operations

Paper job sheets, rekeyed data, scheduling by whiteboard, compliance evidence assembled on request. This is not a criticism. It is where the most obvious gains are.

An owner planning to step back

Retiring within a few years, or already stepping back and finding the business still depends on them more than it should.

What changes and what does not

The people on site are the business. Nothing about our plan works without them.

What we invest in

Scheduling and job management that does not depend on one person remembering
Getting work recorded once, at the point it happens, rather than typed up later
Compliance evidence assembled continuously instead of reconstructed on request
Invoicing that follows the work closely rather than weeks behind it
Knowing which contracts are profitable and which are quietly not

What stays as it is

The people who know the sites and the clients who trust them
The client relationships and the account handling that goes with them
The standards the business has built its reputation on
The name, unless there is a good reason to change it and you agree with it

A maintenance business is not worth much without the people who know which plant on which site is about to give trouble.

Common questions

Do you mean property management?

Property is one of several. We are interested in businesses that manage physical assets for their owners under contract, which covers facilities, infrastructure, plant, equipment and maintenance management. The shape of the business matters more to us than the asset class.

Is our work too specialised?

Specialised is usually a positive. Work requiring particular accreditation, licensing or expertise is harder for a client to move and harder for a competitor to take. We do not need to be experts in your discipline. Your team already is, and they stay.

We have a lot of vans, kit and depots. Does that put you off?

No. Businesses with real operational assets and real people are what we are looking for. It affects how a deal is structured rather than whether we are interested.

What happens to our field team?

They stay, and the aim is to take administrative work off them rather than out of the business. The people who know the sites are the largest part of what we would be buying.

Start a conversation

If any of this sounds like your situation, let us buy you a coffee. We would like to hear where you are, what you are thinking, and work out together whether we are any use to you.

Get in touch