The Exit Partnership: How can we help you get the right exit for you and your clients?

If you’re thinking about selling your financial advice business, you’ve probably started looking for someone to make a range of introductions to potential buyers and help broker the best deal. Before you get started, there are some important questions to ask yourself:

• Is your broker going to act in your best interests, or those of the buyer?
• Will your broker show you every appropriate sale option, or just the ones they’re linked to, have experience with, or will get paid on?
• Do you want to take advice from a broker who’s sold other people’s businesses, but who’s never sold (or even run) their own?

Think about the brokers you’re considering. Will working with them give you the right answers? If not, we may be able to help.

Who are we?

The Exit Partnership is led by Victoria Hicks and Brian Hill, plus a team of talented colleagues. We’ve both exited our own financial advice businesses with both the success and scars to prove it. Now we’re on a mission to help advisers, planners and wealth managers like you who want to do the same.

Unlike virtually all of the brokers you’ll come across, we’ve actually been in your shoes. We have first-hand, hard-won experience of buying and selling regulated firms, our own ones included. That means we can share the things we wished we’d known then that we now use to help people like you to help you get the best deal possible.

We’re very proud of the work we do here at The Exit Partnership, and believe we offer something quite unique. Through the services we’ve created for our clients, we can help you secure the exit that’s right for you, whatever your situation.

How can we help you get the right exit?

In our quest to help business owners find the right exit for them, we’ve developed two ways you can work with us:

1. Partner Route

Under this route, we act for you, the seller of the business, not the buyer. This option is especially suitable if your business has recurring revenue of over £250,000 and you’re actively seeking an exit, and offers some specific advantages:

As your exit Partner, we’ll work directly for you, not the buyer, removing any potential conflicts of interest. Taking this route also gives you many more sale options, because we can approach buyers who aren’t on brokers’ books, or those who may not publicise they’re actively looking to buy.

When you’re a Partner, we invest a lot of time going over every aspect of your sale and understanding exactly what you want to achieve. As a result, the outcome is likely to be very good indeed.

2. Broker Route

This is what you might call the “traditional” route. It’s probably the best route if your recurring revenue is under £250,000, if you’re just exploring your options, or if you’re accepting introductions from multiple sources.

But there’s also one feature unique to the Exit Partnership:

We’ve set a fair charging structure to ensure all the buyers we work with pay us the same fee, so you know we’re completely unbiased and impartial.

When most brokers put forward potential buyers for your business, do you know how much they’ll receive? Do you know if they have different terms agreed with different buyers? Can you be sure they’re not focusing first on the ones paying them the best fee, rather than those who’d give you the best deal?

There are even brokers out there who charge both parties, or even have shares in the acquiring firms – a double payday for them! Make sure you understand exactly how anyone you’re working with will be paid. They may well claim their services are free (you probably know some financial advice firms who claim that too…), but we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch!

What’s our story?

When you’re looking for support with something as important as selling your firm, you need to know you’ve got the best team in your corner. We like to think we make for a powerful duo, thanks to our experience and our passion to help business owners like us and like you.

Victoria is a Charted Financial Planner by profession. She worked her way up the career ladder to become one of the owner-managers of a chartered planning practice in York, as well as sitting on several advisory boards and committees. Victoria exited in 2019, setting up City & Capital Acquisitions shortly after.

Brian ‘fell into’ financial planning in 2007, going on to establish a fixed-fee financial planning firm, which he exited in 2020 whilst living ‘la dolce vita’ in Italy. After receiving calls for help from other owners of financial advice firms seeking his advice on selling their own businesses, he wanted a way to share his insight and experience with a wider audience.

When we met, we hit it off straight away, because we both wanted to build the same kind of business: one that puts clients first, just as we did when we were financial planners. Now that we’ve joined forces as The Exit Partnership, we’re ready to help others with their business sales, something you only have one chance to get right.

In her home life, Victoria has two children. Her hobbies include yoga and singing, the latter a throwback to her childhood drama classes. Victoria has also recently taken up wild water swimming.

Brian is dad to three children. In his spare time, he’s a fully qualified ski instructor. Brian also volunteers for his local search and rescue team, finding missing and vulnerable people and getting them back to safety and their loved ones.

Why choose us

When you’re ready to sell your business, you’ll face a huge number of decisions. Our job is to help you make the right decisions and avoid the wrong ones.

Through the work we do and the way we each spend our spare time, it’s clear we’re both focused on helping people. Since we sold our businesses, we want to pass on the lessons we’ve learned.

We’re often invited to take part in events around the country (this November, we’ll be at the PFS Festival of Financial Planning, as well as Humans Under Management), and the reputations we’ve built for ourselves mean so much to us. The Exit Partnership is the latest chapter in our long and varied careers, and we plan to continue helping people for quite some time to come.

Get in touch

Do you feel ready to sell your financial advice business? Are there still some questions before you make up your mind?

Whatever stage you’re at, we’d love to talk to you. We’ve successfully navigated the journey you’re about to start, and we can guide you carefully through it.

Contact us today to learn how we can help sell your business.