Selling your electrical contracting business

An established electrical contracting firm is harder to build than most people understand. The NICEIC assessment passed every year without drama. Apprentices who came in as school leavers and now run jobs on their own. Periodic inspection and testing work that comes back because a facilities manager trusts your certificates. A place on a framework that took years of clean delivery to earn. None of it happened quickly, and none of it is easily replaced.

At some point the question arrives: what happens to all of this when you stop? For many founders there is no obvious answer. The children have careers of their own. The senior electricians are good at the work, not at buying companies. And most of the buyers who advertise for firms like yours want something quite different from what you want.

Why succession often goes badly in this trade

The common routes each carry a cost. A consolidator buys the firm to fold it into a national brand. The name comes off the vans and the office is centralised. Within a few years the business you built is a line in someone else’s accounts. The qualified supervisors who carried your reputation tend not to stay for that, and the maintenance clients tend to follow them out.

A trade sale to a competitor carries a different risk. In this trade word travels, and it travels early. Once your senior people hear the firm is on the market, some of them will take the calls they had been ignoring. A buyer can walk away from a deal; you cannot walk away from what the process has already set in motion.

The third route is simply winding down. It is more common than anyone admits. The test instruments are sold, the accreditations lapse and the clients are handed a list of other contractors. Decades of goodwill end because nobody offered a better way to stop.

None of these outcomes is anyone’s fault. They follow from the fact that most buyers are buying a contract book, not a company.

What Lambton does instead

Lambton is a holding company. We buy established private companies and we keep them. We do not buy in order to sell on, and we do not merge the businesses we hold into one another. The name stays on the vans and on the certificates. The team stays on the tools. Clients deal with the same people they dealt with before.

That approach suits electrical contracting, because so much of the value sits in things a careless buyer can destroy without noticing. The qualified supervisor whose signature the scheme assessor knows. The wholesaler accounts, and the terms that took years to earn. The client who rings your office first because your paperwork has never let them down. We buy the company to protect those things, not to strip them out.

The deal itself is kept plain. We tell you what we would pay, how, and when, in writing your accountant can work through in an afternoon. If you want to stay on for a period after the sale, we agree that with you. If you would rather hand over across a number of months and step back, we shape it that way instead. What we ask in return is honesty about the business — its people and its problems — so that what we buy is what you actually built.

Where to start

You do not need a broker to talk to us, and a conversation commits you to nothing. Write to us directly, in confidence, and tell us about the firm. We will tell you honestly whether it fits what we hold, and if it does not, we will say so quickly rather than waste your time.