You’ve identified a business you’d like to buy. The owner probably doesn’t know you exist. Here’s how to move from that moment to a conversation without making costly mistakes.

Finding a business you want to acquire is the easy part. Knowing what to do next is where most would-be buyers stall. Do you contact the owner directly? Do you go through a broker? What do you actually say to the business owner? And how do you avoid alerting competitors, unsettling staff, or simply being rebuffed before you’ve even started?

These are questions that don’t have obvious answers, particularly for owner-managers making their first acquisition. In our experience, the approach stage is where more deals fail to get off the ground than at any other point in the process – not because the numbers don’t work, but because the first contact is handled in a way that closes the door before any conversation can begin.

This guide walks you through the process step by step, from that initial moment of you thinking “I’d like to buy that business” through to getting a deal on the table.

First: Make sure you’re actually ready to buy

Before you approach anyone, you need to be honest with yourself about your readiness. Nothing damages your credibility or wastes more time than approaching a business owner, generating interest, and then being unable to demonstrate that you’re a serious buyer.

At minimum, before making contact you should be able to answer:

What’s your acquisition rationale? Are you buying for geographic expansion, to acquire a customer base, to bring in-house a capability you currently outsource, to remove a competitor, or to accelerate growth? You don’t need to share all of this with the seller, but you need to know it yourself. It will shape everything from your valuation approach to your negotiation position.

What can you afford to pay? Have a realistic sense of your budget – not just what you’d ideally spend, but what you could actually fund. Do you have cash reserves? Would you need debt finance, or are you planning to approach a bank or alternative lender? Have you spoken to your accountant or a commercial finance adviser about your borrowing capacity? Sellers and their advisers will ask these questions early, and vague answers kill deals before they start.

What does integration look like? How would this business operate alongside or within yours? Would you keep the existing team? Retain the seller for a transition period? Merge the two operations or run them separately? You don’t need a detailed integration plan at this stage, but you should have thought it through in broad terms.

If you can’t answer these questions confidently, spend time on them before making any approach. A buyer who seems unprepared is far less likely to be taken seriously, regardless of how good the deal might look on paper.

Understand what you’re buying – from the outside

Before making contact, do as much digging as you can using publicly available information. This serves two purposes: it helps you assess whether the business is genuinely worth pursuing, and it means you arrive at any conversation informed rather than ignorant.

Companies House is your first stop. Filed accounts will give you a broad picture of revenue, profitability, net assets, and any charges registered against the business. For smaller businesses, these may be filleted, but they’ll still tell you something useful, particularly about trajectory over the past few years.

Their website and social media presence will tell you about their positioning, customer base, how they present themselves, and how active they are in marketing their services. A business that hasn’t updated its website in three years or has a dormant LinkedIn page may signal either neglect or an owner who is winding down, both potentially relevant to your approach.

Google reviews and industry directories can give you a sense of reputation and customer sentiment that accounts alone won’t reveal.

Trade press and local business media – particularly for regional businesses – may have covered the company at some point. A feature in trade press or the business pages of a regional newspaper might tell you about growth plans, key clients, or ownership ambitions.

LinkedIn profiles of the founders and directors can be revealing. An owner who has been with the business for 30 years and is now in their late 60s may be thinking about succession. One who has recently started posting about “the next chapter” or “exciting new opportunities” might already be considering a sale.

Note: None of this replaces proper financial due diligence, which comes much later. What it does give you is a basis for a credible, informed conversation.

Decide how to make the approach

This is the decision most buyers agonise over, get it wrong and you can close a door that might never reopen. There are broadly three routes.

The direct approach

You contact the owner yourself, either by letter, email, or phone. This is more common than people think, and it can work well, particularly when there is a genuine existing relationship, a shared network, or a natural conversational hook.

The advantage is that it’s personal, direct, and signals that you’ve specifically identified their business rather than fishing around a broker list. Owners often respond more warmly to someone who clearly knows who they are and why they’re interested, compared to an anonymous approach via an intermediary.

The risk is that without the buffer of a professional adviser, the conversation can feel uncomfortable on both sides, and a poorly worded approach can cause offence or raise alarm, particularly if the owner has no intention of selling and worries about the approach becoming known in their industry or to their staff.

If you go direct, keep your initial contact brief, respectful, and non-committal. You are exploring whether there is any interest in a conversation, not making an offer, and not assuming they want to sell. A short letter or email along these lines tends to work better than a cold phone call, which can feel intrusive.

Through a mutual contact or introduction

If you share a network i.e. a trade association, a Chamber of Commerce, a shared professional adviser, or simply a mutual acquaintance (LinkedIn is helpful for checking this) a warm introduction can significantly increase the chances of a positive response. People are far more likely to take a meeting when it comes recommended by someone they trust.

This approach takes longer to engineer but tends to result in better-quality conversations. If you know someone who knows the owner, a quiet word asking whether an introduction would be appropriate is worth exploring before going direct.

Through an adviser

Instructing a corporate finance adviser or transaction services specialist to make the approach on your behalf adds a layer of professionalism and distance that many owners find easier to engage with. Rather than receiving a direct approach from a competitor or industry peer, they’re being contacted by an adviser acting on behalf of an unnamed party – which feels less threatening and more like a formal, trusted process.

We’ve successfully initiated acquisitions for clients using exactly this approach – in one case, a carefully targeted cold approach to a business that had never considered a sale led to a completed transaction that fundamentally transformed our client’s service offering and opened up an entirely new market for them. The owner later told us he would never have engaged with a direct approach from a buyer, but was comfortable taking an exploratory call from an adviser.

This route works particularly well for larger transactions, for situations where confidentiality is paramount, or where you suspect the owner may react badly to a direct approach. The adviser can test the water, gauge interest, and establish whether there is any appetite for a conversation before your identity is even revealed.

The trade-off is cost and speed – but for the right deal, having professional representation from the outset often pays for itself many times over.

What to say… and what not to say

Whether you approach directly or through an adviser, the framing of your initial contact matters enormously.

Do be clear about who you are and why you’re interested in their specific business. Flattery, used sparingly and sincerely, works – owners who have built a business from nothing respond well to genuine recognition of what they’ve achieved.

Do make clear that you’re at an exploratory stage. You are not making an offer. You are asking whether there is any interest in having a conversation about the future of their business. This is a much lower-stakes ask, and it’s easier to say yes to.

Do reassure them about confidentiality. Most sellers’ first concern is that staff, customers, or competitors will find out and send the rumour mill into overdrive. If you can credibly signal that you understand and respect this, you remove a significant barrier.

Don’t arrive with a number. Suggesting a valuation in an opening approach almost always goes wrong. Too low and you’ve insulted them; too high and you’ve anchored a price before you know anything meaningful about the business. Leave price out of the first conversation entirely.

Don’t suggest the business has problems that you could fix. Even if true, this will feel condescending to someone who has spent years building it, and it will immediately put them on the defensive.

Don’t reveal more about your strategic rationale than you need to. If you’re buying to eliminate a competitor, that’s probably not something to lead with.

Managing the early conversations

If your approach generates interest and the owner agrees to meet, the early conversations serve a specific purpose: to establish mutual interest, build personal rapport, and understand the owner’s motivations, especially around timing, price expectations, and what they want to happen to the business after a sale.

That last point is often underestimated. Many sellers – particularly founder-owners who have built a business over decades – care as much about what happens to their staff and their legacy as they do about the headline price. Understanding and genuinely engaging with those concerns will differentiate you from a purely transactional buyer and build the kind of trust that sustains a deal through difficult moments.

At this stage, you are listening far more than you are talking. Ask open questions. Understand their journey. Find out whether they have a timeframe in mind. Establish whether they have spoken to anyone else, or whether you are the first person to have approached them.

One thing we consistently observe is that deals which feel pressured from the buyer’s side make sellers nervous – sometimes fatally so. We’ve seen transactions that were commercially sound fall away entirely because the buyer’s urgency felt threatening rather than enthusiastic. Patience, particularly in the early stages, is a significant competitive advantage.

Many buyers try to manage the early stages of an acquisition themselves and only bring in advisers once things are already complicated. In most cases, this is a false economy.

When to bring in professional support

Getting professional support early – from a transaction services adviser and a corporate tax specialist – means you avoid common pitfalls around structure, valuation, and negotiation that are much harder to unpick once a deal is in progress. It also sends a signal to the seller that you are a serious buyer with a proper team behind you, which in itself can accelerate a process.

Specifically, early professional involvement helps with:

Valuation sense-checking. Before any meaningful numbers are discussed, understanding how the business is likely to be valued – and what that means for what you should be prepared to pay – is essential. Paying over the odds through misunderstanding valuation methodology is one of the most common and costly mistakes acquisitive buyers make.

Deal structure. There are often multiple ways to structure an acquisition – share purchase versus asset purchase, deferred consideration, earn-out arrangements, loan notes – and the right structure depends on tax efficiency, risk allocation, and the seller’s own tax position. Getting this wrong, or agreeing heads of terms without understanding the structural implications, can be expensive to correct.

Due diligence. Once you’ve agreed commercial terms and moved to a formal process, thorough financial, tax, and legal due diligence is non-negotiable. This is where skeletons fall out of cupboards and where deals that looked straightforward on the surface can become significantly more complex. In our experience, it’s rare for a transaction to complete without at least one issue surfacing at due diligence stage that wasn’t visible from the outside. Having an experienced team who have navigated these issues before is worth considerably more than their fee.

The most important thing

Approaching a business you want to acquire is fundamentally a human process before it is a financial one. The seller is being asked to consider handing over something they have almost certainly poured significant time, energy, and personal risk into building. How you approach them, how you conduct yourself in early conversations, and whether they trust you as both a buyer and a person will shape everything that follows.

The deals that complete smoothly tend to be the ones where both parties felt respected throughout the process. That starts with how you make the first contact.

This article is intended as general guidance for owner-managers considering an acquisition. Every transaction is different, and the content here is not a substitute for professional advice tailored to your specific circumstances. If you are at any stage of an acquisition process and would like a confidential conversation, we would be happy to help.

How to approach a business you want to acquire