Could you sell your business during lockdown? You can if you communicate like this.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. This is the podcast for you if you are a business owner or an organization leader, and you've got value locked up in your organization if you could just find a way to share it. Now today I'm going to talk about communication when you're selling your business. Exiting a company takes a great deal of skill when it comes to communication. I'm very lucky today to have had time on the mic with Brian Hill, who recently sold his business in spite of lockdown and in spite of being 1,000 miles away from the buyer of his company. Now, Brian founded a company called Jones Hill, which is a financial advisory service here in the UK. Brian joined me on the mic, but the audio quality was so bad that today what I'm going to do is I'm going to share his story with you because he relayed it to me and there's so much value in here. We're going to talk about how he managed the 3 stakeholder groups: his employees, the buyers, and the new customers. Now I'm going to just give you the narration to the talk because Brian explains this really better than anybody else could possibly do. So let me just share with you what he shared with me. Now they had been working on a sale for a couple of years, and as Brian says, they had kissed a lot of frogs along the way, but they eventually found one. That would suit. Now, they had 2 main problems. The first one was that he was living in Italy with his family because they'd left the UK in 2018. That meant that he was working from a distance. The other issue, of course, was the coronavirus. And they were living in a regulated place called Lombardia, which is actually particularly near Brescia. And as you may have seen the TV pictures, it was surrounded by armored cars and trucks. So they're living just 20 minutes down the road, but they were very much in lockdown. And they were 1,000 miles away from their business and trying to sell it. So it was a big, big challenge. But eventually, they did manage to find a way through this. And on the 4th of September, the deal was successfully transacted where they sold their business. With 150 clients to another British company and leaving the staff in the new business. So the target audiences for Brian, number one, were the clients, and number two, of course, were the employees, and number three was the company buying the business. So there are a lot of people that they were working with that they had to communicate with, and I thought this is why it makes such a fascinating Speak PR story. Now, the clients are the ones that Brian put first, and he knew that they really need to communicate from the perspective of what's in it for them. He made them the center of the story. And he shared with them how they're going to be better off after this transaction. And so he made a point of sharing his news with them from their perspective. And he worked with Peter Rolleston of the Progress Shed here in the UK in Somerset, and they spent a lot of time crafting the messages, and they delivered in a way that they felt was most appropriate. So what he actually did was to make a short 3-minute video, and the video was just with Brian Hill. And he had a photograph of his— of himself with his university mortarboard and degrees and with his parents. And he did this because he wanted to demonstrate that he's going to be leaving the business to move on, to go on to university to start his doctorate. So he'd thought very carefully about the messaging by the way that the photography was profiled in the video. Now, he also just used a regular handheld video. He didn't want it to seem too posh or anything overly professional. He just wanted to talk to the camera and talk to the clients as though they were one-on-one. He was in his home setting. That was important. So he felt that that's where his clients could relate to him because they would also be at home watching this. The video was sent out on a Friday evening by 5:30. On the Saturday morning, the letters arrived from the business that had purchased his company. So he had a video in advance, and then he had a letter the next day. So it was tightly organized with no gap over the weekend. Now, the perspective of the customer. Was always held central, and the feedback from the clients was excellent. There was no spectacular revolt. There was no concern that he was leaving the business and leaving them alone, but they were all supportive of his move on to his doctorate, and they were still therefore getting the clients. Now, the thing that he had also worked on with Peter Rolleston was some FAQs. So in the video, and along with the letter that went out on the Saturday morning, they'd already put questions that they knew would be asked by the clients. So they talked about things like whether people could still go to the Bradford-upon-Avon offices, what's happened to Brian, uh, which he didn't think many people would ask, but some people did. So there were some 20 questions, and Answers and offered, of course, that people could still have a meeting or a phone call with him if he wanted to. Want to make sure there was some continuity, and we talk about any kind of change or crisis management all being about business continuity. So the challenge for Brian, though, of course, was that he couldn't see people because of lockdown. But the video was a great way of overcoming that. Actually, interestingly enough, lockdown was almost the perfect cover because he was able to send. 150 emails to people without needing to justify why he was sending emails and not visiting them all one at a time. Now, he was careful in the videos and in the letters not to use any alarmist words. He just said, this is something that we're going to share with you in the email, and they made it a very calm and relaxing and reassuring Email. Now, in tandem, Brian had been working with Peter Rolleston on preparing the messaging for the team. Now, the issue here was that they knew they were in negotiations, and they knew that they needed to tell the team once the documents had been exchanged and the sale had been agreed. But the issue was due to lockdown that they didn't know when that would be. So they had already prepared a number of scenarios and lines that they were going to communicate with the staff, because obviously the business was of value to the buyers because of the customers, but also because of the people that were in place to look after those customers. What they worked on then, Brian and his advisory team, was to put together some messages that would give the team, the existing staff, some reassurance. It was all well planned. And what was not planned for was when one of the members of staff rang saying that they'd seen on a business broking website the Jones Hill business. It wasn't named as such, but the size and the sector were detailed. And The person who rang the member of staff said there are only two companies like this in the whole of Bradford and Haven. Was it us? And so Brian was put in an awkward position. He was put in a position where he had to decide what to do there and then. And so what he did was he went through the scenario with this member of staff, and he said, "This is what's going to happen for you." This is the timing, and this is what you can expect. And he said to the team that he'd managed to secure the client's financial future and the jobs for the team. Now, it was not going to be a perfect timing to tell them like this, but he knew that once one person knew, and once there were expectations out there, that everybody had to know straight away. So by this stage, Brian had been in the business for 15 years and has a high profile in the profession. So for him to step back from the business and indeed go into another area altogether was for the team and for the clients quite a big surprise. But Brian wanted to make sure that it was all managed as well as possible, and so that the team members would stay. With the company, and he wanted to ensure that they would stay on the same terms as though they had not had any break in service with Jones Hill. And Brian managed to do that, which is a credit to him really, and also a sign of the importance of integrity— that a business owner has that duty of care to the employees and the business partners who have trusted that person to lead them and to manage the business effectively. So now we turn our attention to the communication with the potential buyers. And Brian mentioned there were some 29 companies that he spoke to over the 2-3 year period of the transaction. So what Brian did was to make sure that he responded very quickly when he was asked for information. He made sure that he already had all the financial information well in place. He had already made sure that there were non-disclosure agreements in place, so that if anyone did have information, and of course they would all be from the same industry in order to be interested in this, that there would be no leakage. And Brian said that momentum. Was really the key. The second that they needed to get the information, he would share that, and he would keep things going with a timeline so that he'd make sure that the deal and the transaction didn't drift. So that was a key part for him: was that this issue of compliance? And due diligence and speed to ensure that the communication was done clearly, but also with momentum, that there was a known goal, there was a known timeline. Now, when things were going slowly, they would say that the accountability and the decision and delegation of who had which tasks to do was really key. And this was key especially during lockdown when people were not coming to the same office as one another. So they had to have this process clearly identified, the roles and responsibilities clearly identified, and the documentation to safeguard the privacy of the numbers they were sharing, but also to make sure that they had enough disclosure that the other party could find out whether they did or did not really want to carry on with the business. Now, I asked Brian, well, what happens if someone takes the information and uses it to their own ends? And Brian said, well, that would really be professional suicide because it's such a small industry that anybody that did take time or did take the materials away from the deal and didn't delete them as Brian asked for once they decided the deal was not for them would be negligent. So the 3 stakeholder groups that Brian has spoken with— he first of all had in focus his customers, then he had his employees, and then he had the potential buyers. Now these communication tracks were not sequential, they took place in parallel. And what struck me about Brian's descriptions of the work that he did was that he had the three tracks very clearly laid out, and in the Speak PR methodology, we talk about the need for addressing three different audiences: the internal, the partners, and the external. And that we talk about personalization of the message by identifying the avatars, looking at the different. Interest areas, the different kinds of people. The customers want to know that their money is safe, the employees want to know that their job is safe, and the investors wanted to make sure that their investment was safe. So Brian did a great job of having all of these scripts already in place. He used technologies like Mailchimp and YouTube to send out the video announcements to people. And he understood ultimately that integrity was going to be a key part of the success of this whole negotiation. How he dealt with his customers would mean they would stay or leave. How he dealt with his staff would mean they would stay or leave or try and sabotage the deal. And how he dealt obviously with the investors would color their interest in the investment. So I was very grateful to Brian for sharing really the sort of DNA of a sale transaction communication. Now Brian has left the business and he is now running a new business where he's set up called Kinetics, which is providing training for professionals in nonverbal communications. In fact, he has postgraduate qualifications in that. He's going on to do his doctorate. So he's also a ski instructor and bilingual and a former British Forces officer. So Brian is a man of many talents, and one of which is clearly knowing how to communicate during a commercial negotiation. So it's very grateful to Brian for sharing with me and coming on the mic, and I apologize that you're not able to hear him. But as he's in his new office, he didn't have all the necessary equipment with him, and the sound quality was not good enough to play out tonight. But I didn't want to delay in sharing this information because I know there are people out there who are looking to extract value from their business and maybe in the midst of negotiation with third parties. To sell their business. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners and leaders who want to unlock the value in their organization and just looking for free and effective ways to do so using public relations. My name is Jim James. If you've enjoyed this, then please do rate the show, do subscribe, and come to our website at eastwestpr.com for this and more newsletter information. And if you need any consulting on this or any manner of public relations, do please get in touch with me. You can find me at eastwestpr.com. But until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that if you're in the midst of a transaction, you take some of Brian's advice to heart and remember that above all, it's integrity that really sells.