Finance
Grant Thornton top M&A league
Grant Thornton has been ranked as the UK’s number one financial adviser by deal volume, in the latest Experian MarketIQ M&A Review. The accolade comes as the firm
celebrates another successful year of merger and acquisition (M&A) deal activity. The Experian MarketIQ M&A
Review also recognises Grant Thornton’s regional presence, placing the firm in second place for the volume of deals, with the Midlands’ team advising on a total of 28 transactions. Nationally, the firm’s corporate
finance team was involved in a total of 165 publicly disclosed deals, and 179 transactions overall, in the 2017 calendar year with a total transaction value of £5.5bn. This represents a 25 per cent
increase in the volume of completed transactions over 2016 for the M&A team, with an average transaction value of £31m. Of these transactions, more than
a quarter (26 per cent) were cross- border deals, highlighting the continued interest from international firms in gaining a
Finance star: Alex Hyde
foothold in the UK and the continued drive to develop international markets. Birmingham-based Alex Hyde,
director in Grant Thornton’s transaction advisory services team, said: “Whilst the overall deal market experienced some economic and political headwinds, 2017 was a very busy and exciting year for our team. “The total number of deal
completions in the UK market was down by close to 10 per cent, but we delivered a 25 per cent increase in the number of deals closed by our national advisory team.”
Sector Focus
Managers are ‘holding many companies back’
Almost half of business owners in the West Midlands fear their management team is holding back their company’s development - while 53 per cent of management teams in the region have never helped grow a business prior to the one in which they now work. Research by accountant Haines Watts has also revealed that 81 per
cent of West Midlands business owners spend less than 10 per cent of their working week planning for the future. The study shows that SMEs
with low growth (below five per cent) are less likely to have a full strategic plan and are more likely to describe their business plan as nothing more than a financial forecast for the bank. Darren Holdway, regional
‘The knowledge essential to the future success of the business is locked up in the heads of just one or two people’
managing partner at Haines Watts, said: “Because many management teams aren’t unified behind a strategic business-wide plan, and because they often don’t possess the complete trust of the business owner, the knowledge essential to the future success of the business is locked up in the heads of just one or two people. This leaves management teams uninformed and restricted from stepping up. As a result owners have to think operationally and so have less time to plan prevents them from reaching their own growth ambitions.” Despite almost half of business owners lacking trust in their
management teams, the teams themselves don’t realise that trust isn’t there. More than two thirds (70 per cent) of West Midlands senior managers believe they fully understand the business owner’s goals and even greater numbers (86 per cent) hold the, often false, belief they would be trusted to run the business even in the owner’s absence.
March 2018 CHAMBERLINK 57
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