Lee Hartley: Ask lots of questions, don't eat the bulls**t

Never mind the stock answers

clock • 4 min read

The advice sector is ‘frothy’ right now, to use corporate finance parlance. Lee Hartley sets out the questions all business owners should ask when talking to consolidators…

Full disclosure, I stole the title from the lyrics of a song by the pop/punk band Hey! Hello!… however, I think it frames this missive quite well. The point I'm trying to make is that right now our sector is in an extremely dynamic state (commonly known as ‘frothy' in corporate finance vernacular) with huge amounts of M&A activity - but this comes with a lot of associated ‘noise'. As a consequence, there are a multitude of wealth management consolidators (or simply businesses like us who grow through structured acquisition) all waving chequebooks around and making lots of promises. ...

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