Simon Bedard

Your members have been taught how to run a practice, price their work and manage a team. What the practice itself is worth is the part the training leaves out, and it is the number their retirement rests on.

This session takes a practice apart the way a buyer does. Simon walks through how a professional services practice is actually valued, which parts of it a buyer will pay a multiple for and which they treat as a cost, and why two practices with the same revenue can be worth very different amounts. He covers owner dependence directly, because in a practice built on relationships it is usually the largest single discount a buyer applies. The session finishes on the three years before a sale and what can still be changed in that window.

Revenue keeps a business running. Value is what an owner ultimately builds, and the two are not the same thing.

Simon explains why not all revenue is valued equally, and what a buyer is genuinely prepared to pay a multiple for. Recurring revenue, customer concentration, contract quality, gross margin and who the relationship actually belongs to all move the number, sometimes more than the top line does. He then connects it back to the work an owner is already doing: how marketing and sales activity can be pointed at a more valuable and more saleable business rather than simply a busier one.

Every technical profession reaches a point where doing the work well stops being enough to grow the firm. Clients start asking questions that sit outside the technical brief, competitors commoditise the core service, and the practices that pull away are the ones whose people have moved from delivering a task to advising on a decision.

Simon delivered this to the national body of business broking, a profession midway through exactly that shift. The session covers what the transition actually requires: the questions a trusted advisor asks that a technical practitioner does not, how the commercial model changes, what it does to pricing and referrals, and where practitioners get stuck. It also covers what it does to the value of the practice, because an advisory relationship transfers to a buyer in a way that a transactional one does not.

A generation of Australian business owners is approaching the exit at the same time, and the market they will sell into has a fixed capacity to absorb them.

Simon sets out the demographic picture, what it means for the price and the terms available to an owner who arrives late, and why the timing of a decision matters as much as the preparation behind it. As National Chair of the Australian Institute of Business Brokers he has put this case to members of parliament and made a submission to the Productivity Commission on a national succession strategy and government-backed acquisition finance, and the session includes that position and where it currently sits.

Selling when the time is right sounds like a plan, until you notice that the timing never announces itself.

Simon has sat with owners who intended to sell for years and came to market on somebody else's schedule instead. This session is about the cost of that gap. It covers what a buyer sees in a business that has been prepared and one that has not, how long real preparation takes, and what the first twelve months of it involves. It also covers the parts an owner can start without committing to a sale, which is the objection this topic usually meets.

Of the owners surveyed in Exit Like an Expert, 81 per cent wished they had spent more time preparing, and 70 per cent started less than two years before exiting.

When the owner is the business, a buyer is being asked to purchase something that may leave on settlement day.

This session covers key-person risk as a buyer assesses it: where it hides, how it is measured, what it costs in price and in deal structure, and why it is the most common reason an earn-out appears in an offer. Simon works through what a buyer looks for in the team, the systems and the delegated authority underneath an owner, and what a business needs to be able to demonstrate rather than assert.

It is the most fixable of the value discounts, and it takes the longest to fix, which is why it belongs early in a programme rather than late.

When a business-owner client sells, the largest financial event of their life happens, and the adviser who was not in the room usually finds out afterwards.

Simon covers how to spot a client's liquidity event years before it happens, the five conversations that open the subject without prompting a client to go looking for a broker, and how to stay in the room through a sale process so that the proceeds come back to the practice rather than leaving with the client. He is direct about the referral mechanics, including where an adviser's own interests and the client's diverge.

Exit Advisory Group runs the transaction and does not advise on wealth, super or investments, which is stated in the session rather than left to be inferred.

Some owners choose when they sell. Others have the decision made for them by their health, a partnership breakdown, a death, or a buyer who arrives at the wrong moment with the only offer on the table.

Simon has run both. This session sets out what actually differs between them: the price, the terms, the number of buyers at the table, how long it takes, and what it does to the family. It covers the contingency work that protects an owner who has no intention of selling yet, including the shareholder and succession arrangements that decide what happens if the choice is removed.