Mark
Dyer

We buy companies. That is the business.

The way we find them is unusual, and it is the part most people don’t expect: we write letters. We have been direct mailing since 1994, and last year we sent 1.25 million of them. Outside the banks, I would be surprised if many organisations in the country send more.

Then we wait for the phone to ring. We don’t cold-call. Owners come to us when they are ready, on their own timetable, and by then they already know who we are.

The response we get still surprises me. We hear from people who tell us a relative has left them a business — and that the relative’s instruction, years earlier, was that when it happened they should contact The Hacking Trust.

The Hacking Trust is the vehicle we buy through, founded in 1997.

The model is patience. We write to owners on our database and we wait for them to come back to us. Not everyone replies in a month, or a year. We regularly take calls from letters we sent more than twenty years ago — people put them in a drawer, and one day something changes and the letter comes back out.

That is only possible because the name has stayed the same and the offer has stayed the same for thirty years. We have become a known entity, and the business now expands on the back of that.

Old family businesses, mostly. Second, third, sometimes fourth generation.

The people who contact us are often in one of three positions. They have inherited something they never asked for. They have no real relationship with the business and no wish to run it. Or they have simply had enough.

What they all share is the same trap: there is no open market for shares in a private limited company. You can own something genuinely valuable and still have no way of turning it into money, and no obvious person to ask. We offer a route out where there usually isn’t one, which is unusual in this country.

We normally buy 50% or more. We are flexible on how a deal is structured, and because our legal team is in-house we can move quickly rather than waiting weeks on outside solicitors.

What makes me say yes is value that other people have walked past. Inherited businesses in particular are often undervalued by the very people who own them — they have never thought of it as an asset, only as an obligation.

My family invented the bonded edge, aviation fire-suppression systems, match-making equipment, ceremonial swords, garden tools — a long list across a lot of years.

I have always felt naturally inclined the same way. Stingblade is the first thing I have taken all the way through to a finished product, but it won’t be the last; I have other ideas I intend to get to.

They all start the same way, which is that I needed the thing myself and it didn’t exist. That is really all inventing is. Anyone can do it, and I think more people should. It is a healthy way to think, and the world ends up with more useful things in it.

Recycled material because it means we are not putting new plastic into the world to solve a problem the ocean already has. Everyone should be recycling where they can, and we could, so we did.

England because it is a British-designed product and I wanted it to be a British-made one. Buyers respond to that. Great things used to be made in this country. We would like some of that back.

Get up early. Keep fit. Stay off substances — they only ever let you imagine you are doing well. Keep a balanced view of everything, including your own results.

And understand that nothing surpasses hard work. Not contacts, not cleverness, not timing. Hours and hours of consistency, over years. That is the whole of it.

More naturally than people assume.

My office is set up for investigation. We investigate companies, assets, ownership and paper trails as a matter of routine — finding what is buried in a set of records is the day job. Applying that to an almost sixty-year-old case is a difference of subject, not of method.

Beyond that, there is no choice in it. We have to see that mission through to the end.

The full account of the case is at murielmckay.com.

I’m not a great speaker, and I wouldn’t claim to be. What I had to say in that speech was something I cared about, and I think an audience can always tell the difference between someone performing and someone who means it.

The only technique I use, which was given to me by a professional presenter: don’t speak to the room, instead, look at one person at a time.

We are looking for owners who want to sell and can’t — private companies with no buyer in sight and no market for their shares. That is precisely the gap we exist to fill.

We are straightforward to deal with. We don’t ask for the warranties and guarantees a trade buyer would demand, which is unusual and takes a great deal of the pain out of the process. And because our legal team sits in-house, things get done quickly.

If that sounds like your situation, contact my office. It costs nothing to have the conversation.