The Quieter Weeks: Summer Preparation for an Electrical Sale

The SeasonThe quiet weeks are in the office, not on site

For a commercial electrical contractor the summer is the opposite of slow. Schools empty and the rewires start, factories take their annual shutdown, offices refurbish while half the staff are away, and the shutdown fortnight is frequently the hardest planned fortnight of the year. Anyone telling you the trade goes quiet in July has never had four school sites running at once.

What does go quiet is everything around the work. Clients go on holiday, procurement slows, tenders thin out, new enquiries drop off and the phone stops ringing with decisions. That is the gap worth using, because it is the only stretch of the year when nobody is waiting on you for an answer and your own attention is not being pulled somewhere else every hour.

The preparation that matters for a sale is almost entirely desk work, which is why it fits these weeks so neatly. None of it requires a decision to sell. All of it is worth doing anyway, and an owner who does it in July finds that the version of the business a buyer meets in the spring is considerably more convincing than the one they would have met otherwise.

The ListFour things worth doing before September

Start with the contract register, because it is the document that most changes the conversation and the one almost nobody has. One line per client: what the arrangement is, whether it is written, the renewal or review date, the annual value, the margin and who inside your business holds the relationship. The exercise usually reveals two or three arrangements that everybody assumed were documented and are not.

Second, reconcile the certification archive against the jobs. Every installation certificate, minor works certificate and condition report from the last six years should be findable by client and by date inside a few minutes. If that currently means a filing cabinet and somebody's memory, the summer is when to fix it, and the fix helps your own operation long before it helps a buyer.

Third, separate the recurring income from the project income in your management accounts, properly and permanently. Fourth, write down the things that exist only in your head: which client will only deal with you, which framework contact matters, which supplier terms are personal, which engineer is the one you ring when a job goes wrong at nine on a Friday evening. That list is uncomfortable to write and it is the single most useful document you will produce.

The PayoffWhy the owner who starts in July is ready in the spring

Buyer activity in this sector has a rhythm. Approaches cluster from late winter through the spring, when acquirers have their own budgets set, and the businesses that respond well are the ones that already have the paperwork. An owner who starts assembling it after the first approach has arrived spends the next three months doing in a hurry what could have been done calmly, and the hurry shows.

The deeper reason to start now is that the two or three things that genuinely move a valuation change on annual cycles rather than on effort. Written terms arrive one renewal at a time, and there are only so many of those in a year. Handing a client over to a contracts manager is not finished when you introduce him; it is finished when the client rings him first without thinking about it. Building the recurring share of revenue takes longer still, since it means winning a different kind of work rather than more of the same. A summer spent on the paperwork is what makes the following summer capable of changing the number.

Approaches cluster in the spring. The businesses that respond well are the ones that did the paperwork the previous summer.