I want to build a significant business.
Not for the appearance of being an entrepreneur, and not because I believe starting companies from scratch is the only way to create something worthwhile.
I have done that before. Today, I am taking a different approach.
I founded Civsec Group to acquire established businesses providing essential services across the UK and build them for the long term.
Why acquisitions?
Britain has an extraordinary base of privately owned businesses.
Many have been operating for decades. They employ good people, serve customers who have relied upon them for years and generate real profits by doing things the economy actually needs. They were often built without venture capital, enormous marketing budgets or much public attention.
I find those businesses compelling.
Starting a company teaches you how difficult it is to create customers, establish processes, recruit good people and develop a reputation. When you look at a company that has survived for twenty or thirty years, you’re looking at something that somebody has spent a meaningful part of their life building.
Acquisition gives an entrepreneur the opportunity to start from that foundation rather than from zero. But it also creates responsibility.
Buying a business isn’t the achievement
There is a danger in the acquisition world of treating completion as the finish line. I don’t see it that way.
Completing an acquisition gives you ownership. It doesn’t make you a good owner. The real test begins afterwards.
Can you retain the people who made the company successful? Can you maintain the trust of its customers? Can you understand which parts of the business should change and which should be left alone?
Can you make better decisions without destroying the entrepreneurial qualities that made the company successful in the first place?
Those questions interest me considerably more than simply completing transactions.
Why essential services?
Civsec Group is focused on essential service sectors including fire and security, compliance, facilities management, technical building services, electrical controls and building management systems.
I like businesses that solve real problems. Buildings need to remain safe. Fire systems need to work. Regulations need to be complied with. Technical infrastructure needs to be maintained. Facilities still need to operate regardless of what happens to the latest consumer trend.
That doesn’t make these industries immune from economic cycles or disruption. No industry is. But it creates a foundation of genuine customer need.
I also like the characteristics found in many good businesses in these sectors: long-standing customer relationships, specialist knowledge, repeat or recurring work and employees whose experience creates real value.
The succession opportunity
A generation of British entrepreneurs has spent decades building successful companies. Eventually, every founder faces the same question: What happens when I no longer want to run this business?
Sometimes the next generation wants to take over. Sometimes management can buy the company. Sometimes a strategic buyer is the obvious home. And sometimes none of those options is right.
I believe there is room for another kind of owner: one that intends to preserve the strengths of the business, support its people and continue building it over the long term.
That’s the role I want Civsec Group to play.
My route here
My own career has not followed a conventional path.
I spent seven years in the Royal Marines before moving into sales and business development. I spent the following eight years developing commercially, founded several businesses of my own, and later moved into security and operations.
There were successes. There were also things that didn’t work. Both mattered.
Sales taught me that businesses ultimately depend upon people choosing to buy from you. Entrepreneurship taught me what it feels like when the responsibility for making something work belongs to you. Operations reinforced that what gets promised commercially eventually has to be delivered in the real world. And the Royal Marines gave me an early appreciation for preparation, standards and responsibility.
Civsec brings those experiences together.
What I want to build
The ambition is substantial. I want Civsec Group to become a significant owner and operator of essential service businesses. But scale alone isn’t the objective.
I want us to own good companies. I want the founders who sell to us to feel that they chose the right home for what they built. I want capable managers to see opportunity within the group. I want customers to experience businesses becoming stronger rather than disappearing into an acquisition machine.
And I want Civsec to develop a reputation for doing what it says it will do.
That cannot be manufactured through branding. It has to be earned through decisions made over years.
Documenting the process
I am still building Civsec. That is precisely why I am starting to write now.
It would be easy to wait until everything has worked and then construct a neat story explaining why success was inevitable. It rarely is.
Building businesses involves uncertainty, rejected deals, wrong assumptions, difficult decisions and changes of mind alongside the things that go well. I think documenting some of that process while it is actually happening is more valuable.
So I will use this site to write about acquisitions, operating businesses, entrepreneurship and leadership. Some of my views will probably change. I hope they do.
The objective isn’t to create the impression that I have every answer. It’s to become a better entrepreneur and operator while building something worth owning.
Civsec Group is the vehicle through which I intend to do that.
And we’re at the beginning.