Unsung 003 - What's new & Global Summit

Afternoon all,

As ever thank you for being part of the journey. Having paused the newsletter whilst we confirm the Unsung journey for people we’re now set and from this point the newsletter will be twice monthly.

No AI, I will personally put together each one so limit noise and ensure this is human, personal and hopefully of value and interest.

What’s next for Unsung?

1) Denmark & Netherlands. Excitingly we’re now active in Denmark & Netherlands buying a traditional small buiness in each, ourselves in order to prove the country-specific model, find advisers we trust and teach others how. Kapow !!!

2) Business Model. I feel it’s wrong for Unsung to mirror charging the £5k to £12k other people in this space charge to teach buying a small business. OR….creating an emotional sales funnel (rollercoaster) that takes advantage of people’s hope and dreams.

Instead we’ve decided to lower the barrier to teaching people how to do this themselves and effectively do it at cost. Instead we’re moving to a transparent referral/ sponsorship model.

This means that we can enable, Mums, Dads, military leavers, those with little disposable income to learn how. And…not that we need it…we’re incentivised fully on helping people successfully buy a business including educating people on the risks and mitigations; as opposed to selling the dream.

Where we won’t compromise - the community. For the Bootcamps we will never sell tickets online.

We want this to be fun for us too. For us that’s who we spend our time with and help build things together. We’ve also learnt that Unsungers really enjoy who they meet at the Bootcamps and help each other along the way in their individual cohorts. So we’ll continue to speak with all guests prior to accepting a Bootcamp application to ensure they’ll enjoy the day and the crowd.

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3) Season 3 of the Podcast starts 12th Nov. The focus is on small business buying journeys from buyers (including one solely dedicated to poo - genuinely), digging into the experience and thought process of corporate leavers such as the Ex Head of Digital Transformation of GSK (Glaxo SmithKline) choosing to focus solely on traditional small business AI and leaving the safety of corporate behind through to conversations with some of the new Manufacturing franchisees at Isembard (just raised £50Mn and now revolutionising manufacturing) and their why.

4) January Bootcamp - How exactly to buy a small business in a day:
From the previous two bootcamps we’ve now got 18 Unsungers actively speaking to small business sellers having sent out letters and an increasing number at offer stage. Well done!

For January’s bootcamp in London we’ve got 7 spaces remaining.

We’ll be announcing our first Edinburgh bootcamp dates shortly for February.

✅ 👉🏼 Email me here with Subject BOOTCAMP:

Over complication and the feeling of ‘‘needing’’ to add value

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There’s a beauty of long term hold of a traditional small business.

The seller has built something profitable for many year, that works. You don’t need to change it or add value. Buy it on 2.5 to 3.5x net profit. Pay down the debt/finance and or defered payments over 3 to 5 years.

The net profit becomes your dividend/income and you own the asset.

If you want more wealth…buy more companies.

Risk and stress comes from buy and build. A past private equity fund I worked with, who came from the very best of small cap buy and build funds, lost their 4 largest assets (of 11) when trying to do buy and builds.

You don’t need to transform small businesses to add value. In fact…it injects huge risks.

Search Funds are coached by their investors NOT to touch anything for at least 12 months. DTA (Don’t touch anything!). Orca on the podcast even described themselves as Anti AI.

If you’re raisiing equity from investors then fine, you may need to build a narrative of value add transformation and AI that might excite them. However…if you’re buying a business yourself you don’t need to. The returns are huge as is the wealth creation if you buy a provitable business.

If you want to add value having waited to understand what you have bought post acquisition then cool. But you need to work out why it works, why it was built as it was and what has been tried before. Changing things adds risk, particularly for the loyal, humble, hardworking people in these businesses, who often find change and particularly tech platforms hard and uncertainty inducing.

For most people in corporate roles, professionals and founders your experience and judgement already is hugely valuable. If you doubt that…write letters to small business owners and have a fun, humble conversation about their business and like ALL the Unsungers to date you’ll rapidly learn you can add huge value. Not that you need to ;)

Will

In case you missed them here are all the real stories of people in my network, who have acquired a business including some of the practical steps:

Episode - Backing first time CEOs: One of the most popular episodes to date is the session with Orca (UK’s first and most active fund of search funds).

They back people with no CEO experience and no sector experience to buy their own small business and seeing DOUBLE the returns of traditional private equity.

I love it as it’s a great data point on why more people should consider buying their own small business.

Episode is here

Global Summit on Traditional Business Buying

Having spoken to several of the more prominent funds in the small business buying game I’ve decided that, as a generalist community in the space, we’re going to host a large summit in Spring ‘27 on traditional business buying as a whole. The audience is solely those in corporate roles, professionals and founders. We’re not looking to duplicate the awesome work being done by all the commentators in the space.

A key learning for us over the past 3 months is the Unsung community in reality consider more than one of the paths/ options to buy a traditional small business.

So Instead we want to pull together an event covering all of them

-Search Funds
-AI Roll-Ups
-Private Buying & Equity raising
-Private Buying directly

I’d LOVE to hear from you if you’re interested to register early so please do respond GLOBAL SUMMIT in an email to chat.

A learning for me is the value people have placed on those they find at a bootcamp with them. Similarly for me this is for fun, not a transaction. So Unsung will never be selling tickets online and so I’d enjoy chatting with people briefly before accepting guests:

✅ 👉🏼January Bootcamp - London: Please reply to the email with LONDON if interested.

✅ 👉🏼February Bootcamp - Edinburgh: Please reply to the email with EDINBURGH if interested.

I’ll teach end to end how to buy a small business without one’s own money covering:

-How to find small businesses
-How to contact them
Through to…
-Speaking to Sellers
-Financial information and Legal
-How to Finance them
-Completing the Deal

All templates and paperwork you need and i’ll be bringing my advisors and some specialists to talk in details and de-mystify parts.

I will be running this close to cost as mentioned above. I may need to ask in the region of £280-£350 per person to cover venue, food and guest speakers’ travel & accomodation etc.