Your Business Has A Ceiling. It's You.*

*We mean that kindly. It's also the most fixable problem in your business.

Building a business is hard. Getting it bought for silly money is harder. We build it with you. Then buyers turn up.

Apply To Work With Us → First, see the 20 checks a buyer will run on you → Scroll. It gets uncomfortable.

The business outgrows you. You outgrow the day-to-day. No more ceilings.

The Wall

There's a wall between good businesses and serious money.
Most founders hit it before they see it.

£10M+

Roughly the turnover where institutional buyers start returning your calls.

£2M+

The EBITDA mark where serious money starts calling you investable.

No.1

The deal-killer in due diligence: a business that cannot run without its founder. The trade calls it key-person dependency.

You are the best salesperson in the building. Every hire crosses your desk. The biggest customers ring you direct. To you, that feels like commitment. To a buyer, it means the business leaves when you do.

The Doors

You have three ways forward.
All of them are poor.

01 / Hire Consultants

Hire Consultants

Pay fees, receive a strategy document, implement it yourself in the evenings with the team you already do not have. The advice may even be right. But advice does not build businesses. Builders build businesses. Consultants get paid either way.

Poor
02 / Sell Early

Sell Early

Take the offer that comes from below the line. Smaller buyers, lower multiples, half the price deferred and conditional. You give up control of the thing you built, at a fraction of what it could be worth. The first offer is rarely the best one. It is just the earliest.

Poor
03 / Grind On Alone

Grind On Alone

Keep doing what you are doing, harder. Give it five or ten more years and hope the wall moves. It will not. Effort got you this far. It will not get you through.

Nearly half of UK business owners have no exit plan at all, and one in eight has never considered needing one. Of those who do eventually go to market, only around one in five completes a sale. Most people do not decide against selling well. They simply never start.

Poor
Open

The Fourth Door

The scale partnership that makes founder-led businesses institution-ready. We build with you for years, until the business runs without you and the numbers survive a buyer's accountant.

In plainer words: a business worth a multiple of what it is worth today, saleable at a time of your choosing, that keeps running when you are not in it.

PE firms buy businesses. We build them, and the founders who run them, until PE comes asking.

No broken businesses. No passengers. No cheap exits.

Two Builders, One Build

The business and the founder hit the same ceiling.
Because they are the same ceiling.

Lee Liasi

Lee Liasi

Leads the commercial build

20+ years at one firm, and he was one of the small group who ran it. Managing director, and a seat on the senior advisory board where the decisions got made, in a business that set out to lead its market and did it, buying more than 200 companies along the way.

That firm was sold to a private equity house managing around €10 billion. Lee was instrumental in building the business that made the sale possible, and in the work that got it ready to be bought. He knows what they look for when they buy, because he did the work that satisfied one. He then spent five years building the business under that ownership, aiming at the step after: a second sale, or the public markets.

What he works on is the business itself: strategy, systems, how the money is really made, how to scale it, and how to scale it to industry-leading results rather than just to something bigger. He builds high-performance teams with record-breaking retention, teams that keep performing whether you are in the building or not. He mentors a few people outside of this, because he enjoys it. Inside a business he wants to be in it, and what he enjoys most is watching it turn into a serious company and seeing the growth that comes out of the work.

  • Built and ran 150+ businesses inside one group, culminating at £250m turnover and £500m+ in value
  • Ran 15 brands at once, and delivered 80+ rebrands across the group
  • Led 3,000+ people, and appointed and developed the managers and directors who ran them
  • Integrated 65+ acquisitions, buying them, merging them and making them one business
  • Has sat on both sides of the deal table, as the builder and as the buyer
  • Coaches leadership teams as well as founders, because the layer below you decides whether you can leave
Pete Taylor speaking on a panel

Pete Taylor

Leads the CEO build

Pete built a successful business. Six years, a team of twenty, past seven figures, and he sold it. He sold it to go and do this properly: he set up a coaching company and now spends his time working with founders and chief executives, which is what he had come to care about most.

He has coached more than a hundred chief executives one to one across the UK, Europe and Dubai, and taken a thousand more through Heroic Man, which he founded five years ago and still fronts. He works with founders and directors running businesses from £1m to £30m.

What he works on is the founder, and that covers more than people expect. Strategy and the plan. The diary, and handing things over to other people. Sleep. Health. Your marriage. Whether you are any good at being a husband and a father while all this is going on. Plenty of founders build something impressive and lose the rest of it doing so. Pete's job is that you end up with both, and he cares about that as much as the numbers.

  • CEO advisor to founders and directors running £1m to £30m businesses
  • Coaches the whole man, not just the business: body, marriage, mind
  • Built and ran his own multi-seven-figure business over six years with a team of 20, so he has made the founder-to-chief-executive move himself
  • 100+ CEOs coached one to one across 15 years, in the UK, Europe and Dubai
  • Founded Heroic Man five years ago and hosts its podcast. 1,000+ leaders through its programmes, events and retreats
  • Strategy, planning and execution, as well as leadership and capacity

Forty years between us. We have built businesses, bought them and merged them into one. We have hired the leaders, built the teams, and coached the founders running them. Strategy, systems, sales, acquisitions, rebrands, leadership, culture and performance. You get all of it, from both of us, for as long as it takes.

We build the business and the founder at the same time,
because neither one gets there without the other.

The Work

What we actually do,
inside your business.

There is no template. The work is shaped around where your business actually is and where it needs to get to, and it falls into three builds.

Build The Business

  • Growth and strategy: the plan to scale, then the delivery of it
  • Marketing that brings the right work through the door, and a brand that lets you charge properly for it
  • Revenue, retention and data: dashboards and KPIs so decisions run on facts, not gut feel
  • Every process in the business reviewed and tightened: time out, cost out, output up
  • Acquisition integration: bolt-ons turned into one joined-up business, learned across 65+ deals
  • AI and automation put where it removes real work: quoting, reporting, scheduling, chasing customers
  • Key-person risk out, optionality in: sellable when you want it, self-running when you don't

Build The Team

  • High-performance teams that multiply growth rather than just add to it
  • Recruiting properly, so you start attracting better people than you are getting now
  • Keeping them: pay, progression and the reasons good people decide to stay
  • A development plan for every person, and a succession plan behind every job that matters
  • Culture and leadership: how people behave when you are not watching
  • Coaching that turns good managers into leaders who can run their part without you in the room
  • Systems that outlast any one person, so nothing breaks when someone walks

Build The CEO

  • A sounding board that has actually sat in the seat
  • The things that never reach a board agenda: not sleeping, not switching off at dinner, health going last, feeling distant at home. We work on those too
  • Stepping back from the day-to-day without performance slipping
  • Becoming the kind of chief executive a much bigger business needs, which is a different job from the one you have now
  • Decisions under pressure, and working out which ones are actually yours to make
  • One to one through the hard bits: handing things over, growing into a bigger role, working out what comes next
  • The chief executive a buyer wants to meet: calm in diligence, strong at the table

Selection

We decline most people
who apply.

We partner with

  • ✓Founder-led businesses where the founder is still the reason it works
  • ✓Established companies with real revenue, real customers, real profit
  • ✓Businesses that could be much bigger than they are today
  • ✓Founders who can say out loud that the business depends on them too much
  • ✓Owners building towards the day serious buyers come knocking

We decline, without exception

  • ✕Lifestyle businesses. A good plan. Just not our work.
  • ✕Founders looking for a rescue. We build with people, not for them.
  • ✕Anyone allergic to sharing equity. Our model is equity for building.
  • ✕Turnarounds. We make good businesses institution-ready. We do not make failing businesses good.
  • ✕Anyone in a hurry. The build takes years. We say that on day one.

If the first list is you and you read the second without flinching, keep going.

The Month Test

If you disappeared for a month,
would your business survive?

The biggest customers would ring my mobile, not the office.
Nobody else can sign off pricing, hiring, or big decisions.
I have not taken two work-free weeks off in the last year.
If I am honest, the plan for the next stage is in my head and nowhere else.
Tap what's true. We'll be honest back.

Four statements. Tick the true ones. Nobody sees your answers but you. It is the question every buyer will eventually ask, asked years too late. Here it comes early.

The Calculator

What is it worth,
and what could it be worth?

Your sector sets the band. Your size moves the band. The twenty checks decide where inside it you land. Two minutes, no email, and the answer is a range because anybody giving you a single number is guessing.

1 What kind of business is it?
Software & SaaS
Technology services
Healthcare & care
Manufacturing
Distribution & wholesale
Transport & logistics
Professional services
Home & trade services
Food & drink
Marketing & creative
E-commerce
Construction
Retail
Something else
2 Adjusted EBITDA
£

Profit with your own pay set at the going rate for the job.

Not sure? Work it out here
Profit shown in your accounts£500,000
What you pay yourself£50,000
What it would cost to employ somebody to do your job£120,000
The accounts are £70,000 light on that one wage, so take it off−£70,000
Adjusted EBITDA£430,000

Also strip out anything one-off or personal. If you pay yourself the going rate already, your accounts figure is the number.

3 Tick only what is true today

The earnings

The customers

The founder counts double

The paperwork

Pick a sector and put a number in, and this fills in as you tick.

Free · What happens when someone decides to buy you

The 20 checks a buyer runs
on your business.

Most founders meet this list for the first time when a buyer's accountants are already going through the books, with terms agreed and leverage gone. So we published it.

The 20 Checks A Buyer Runs On Your Business. Twenty-eight pages. The 20 checks a professional buyer runs on a founder-led business, the 6 findings that end a deal outright, and the 18-month sequence that fixes them, in the order it has to be done. Every figure sourced.

  • Why two businesses with identical profit are sold in two completely different markets, and the single factor that decides which one you are in (page 4)
  • The valuation ladder, rung by rung, from 2x to 12x and beyond, and exactly what it takes to climb each one (page 7)
  • The quality of earnings adjustment almost every founder is caught by: why taking a modest salary costs you money on the day you sell (page 10)
  • The customer concentration percentages that trigger a re-price, an earn-out, or a walk-away, with the actual numbers (page 11)
  • Why buyers pay 20% to 40% more for a business that does not need its founder, and the five things they inspect to decide (page 12)
  • The 6 findings that end deals outright, separated from the ones that only cost you money (page 15)
  • The same profit priced two ways: £2.25m against £5.25m, and £7.35m once it is properly competed for, using the middle of each range rather than the flattering end (page 16)
  • The 20 checks, scored, with what each band honestly means (page 20)

One email with the PDF attached. We write occasionally about the same subject and you can stop it in one click. We never share your details.

Or ask us a question first: 020 7946 0100, or WhatsApp. Weekdays, and it is one of us who answers.

Cover of The 20 Checks A Buyer Runs On Your Business, a 28 page guide from The Fourth Door
28 pagesPDFSources publishedNo cost

The Structure

How the partnership works.
We only do well when you do.

What the market actually pays

Read this before the numbers. Every multiple below applies to adjusted EBITDA, not the profit figure in your accounts. They are two different numbers, and working from the wrong one is the most common reason a founder's expectation and a buyer's offer end up miles apart.
2x to 4x
adjusted EBITDA
What an owner-managed business is typically priced at, and it presses towards the bottom of that range where one customer is large, turnover is flat, or the owner is the brand.
7x to 12x
adjusted EBITDA
What the same business earns once it runs without you and is properly competed for. UK trade buyers averaged 9.8x and private equity 12.2x in Q3 2024.
20-40%
premium on the multiple
The published premium buyers pay for a business that does not depend on its founder. That gap is what we are paid out of.
EBITDA is the profit in your accounts, before interest, tax and depreciation. Adjusted EBITDA is that profit with your own pay reset to what it would cost to employ somebody to do your job, and one-off costs stripped out. It is the number buyers multiply. For most founder-led businesses these two numbers are not the same, so it is worth knowing which one you are holding.

The deal itself

Everything above is the size of the prize. This is what we agree with you, and how we get paid out of it.

Every business is different, so every deal is different. What we agree depends on where you are, what still has to be built and how long that is going to take. What follows is the shape a typical deal takes, not a fixed offer.

A minority stake, earned

We take 10% to 15% to begin with, vesting over time, rising to a maximum of 25% against agreed milestones. We earn our position by building, the same way you earned yours. You stay the majority owner and the chief executive, at every stage.

Milestones, not promises

Tranches of our equity are tied to agreed milestones: growth delivered, management in place, the founder out of the day-to-day. If the build does not happen, the equity does not vest.

Straight about money

Equity is the point: our real payday only arrives if yours does. Where fees apply they are modest and agreed deal by deal, in the first serious conversation, never after months of free strategy.

A multi-year build, said plainly

Making a business institution-ready takes years, and we would rather you heard that now than in month four. We only work with a handful of businesses at a time, usually around five. That is arithmetic rather than marketing: this is hands-on work and there are only so many hours in it.

Most founders sell when they run out of road. You will sell because you decided to, at your price, in your year.

Yes, and that is the point. The three doors differ by terms, not destination. Sell early and you sell from below the line, at small-buyer multiples, on their terms. Walk through the fourth door and you sell above the line, years later, at institutional multiples, to buyers who came to you, with the choice of whether to sign at all. Never sell from weakness.

Because incentives should point one direction: at the value of your business on the day a buyer names a number. Consultants get paid when they advise. We get paid when it works.

Years, plural, and we say so up front. A business becomes institution-ready when it runs without its founder and its numbers survive a sceptical accountant. Neither happens in a quarter. Anyone promising ninety days is selling you a strategy document with a countdown timer.

Nothing but honesty. You apply, we diagnose, and both sides choose. Most conversations end right there. No partnership, no hard feelings, and you will still walk away knowing more about your business than when you arrived. If it is a no, we will tell you straight and tell you why.

The Record

No promises.
Just the record.

£250M

Turnover built in one business, from the ground up

£500M+

Value created along the way

65+

Acquisitions integrated, and made into one business

3,000+

People led across the group

Hundreds

Senior leaders coached, and dozens of managing directors trained

100+

CEOs coached one to one, across fifteen years

Apply

You apply.
We both choose.

Most applicants are declined. The right ones are built.

You apply. We diagnose: questions first, answers second, and no prescription at all if we are not the right fit. Then we both choose.

We read every application and answer every one, including the declines. If we are not the right partner, we will say so plainly and point you toward the door that fits better.

Fill it in honestly. We read every single one, and every single one gets an answer. We use what you send only to assess the application and reply to it, and nothing is shared with anyone else. If you would rather talk before applying, call 020 7946 0100 or email info@thefourthdoor.co.uk.