If your business is worth less than fifty million pounds, finding help isn't the problem. Finding help built around what buyers are asking now is.

EY and McKinsey take the mandates above that line. Below it, there's a real market — accountants, brokers, exit-planning firms, plenty of them decent at what they do. Most of it was built for a version of due diligence that's already moving on. The checklist that used to get a business ready for sale doesn't ask the question buyers are starting to bring to the table now: if your business runs on software, how much of it could an AI-native competitor rebuild in eighteen months. That's the specific gap Keystone sits in.

Every year, businesses like this change hands across the UK. Family businesses, mostly. Built over ten, twenty, thirty years by someone who put everything into them. Most of those owners sell for less than the business was worth. Not because the business was weak. Because nobody told them, early enough to do anything about it, what a buyer's diligence team would go looking for.

There's no shame in that. Building a business and selling one are different skills entirely. Nobody arrives fluent in the second one. It has its own vocabulary, its own logic, and most founders meet it for the first time in the middle of a live process, which is the worst possible moment to be learning it. What changes that is a plan you're already holding before the first request lands, not one you're improvising after it does.

| "Being in control of your own exit, instead of reacting to someone else's questions one at a time

makes a big difference in the price." |

AI Impact

Something else has changed. If your business runs on software, or competes with something that increasingly does, a buyer is now asking a question nobody asked two years ago. How much of this could an AI-native competitor rebuild in eighteen months, starting from nothing.

I've sat in the room when that question landed badly. A technical lead with no answer for it, in front of people deciding what the business was worth.