• 6,000+ UK Businesses

    Something like six thousand UK businesses in this bracket change hands every year. 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 actually go looking for.

    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 actually go looking for.

    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. That gap in the room is exactly what Keystone is built to close, twelve months before it opens, not on the day it does.

  • What is the Keystone Programme?

    Stop hoping for a high value exit and start planning for it.

    Keystone runs over twelve to twenty-four months, in ninety-day cycles, built around one goal. The business is ready to be sold, and sold well, whenever the owner decides the moment has come.

    It uses OKRs, the same discipline I have spent a decade building with leadership teams, pointed entirely at what a buyer's diligence team will ask anyway. Better it gets answered on your terms, months before the process starts, than under theirs, in a data room, with the multiple already on the table.

    [Read what it actually involves →]

    Who is Keystone designed for?

    Two kinds of business.

    • Family-owned and founder-led companies, usually under fifty million pounds, where the owner is somewhere between one and three years from wanting out.
    • Private equity and venture-backed portfolio companies, where the fund needs the asset re-underwritten before an exit, a continuation vehicle, or the next round.
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    Who has your back?

    If your business is worth less than twenty million pounds, who is looking out for you?

    The big consulting firms take the mandates above that line. Below fifty million, you get a broker. A broker lists the business, writes the teaser, and takes a fee when it sells. Nobody sits with you for the two years before that, doing the work that increases the price.
    I've helped build a business around one bet before. In 2016, I took a strategy consultancy that did a bit of everything and turned it into one that did a single thing. OKRs.

    The advice at the time was not to. We did it anyway. It became a proper name in that market, and we sold it in 2023. I'm making the same bet again, narrower still. Exit-readiness OKRs for the businesses nobody else is properly looking after.

    When we sold we left money on the table.

    I created this programme to help others avoid doing the same thing.

  • Book a 30 minute Call to Learn more

    No heavy sell. I'll share where I went wrong and how I've used those lessons to help others

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