Reads Commercial Finance

Reads Commercial Finance

Funding for the business you are buying, from people who already understand it

Years of selling accountancy practices and other owner-managed businesses taught us one thing above all: who you are in front of decides what you get. Reads Commercial Finance exists to put you in front of the specialist who knows your sector, has funded businesses like yours before, and can make the case for it properly.

Tell us what you are buying Why the right person matters

Private, by introduction. One conversation to start, and no obligation at any point.

Simon Read, founder of Reads Commercial Finance
Simon Read, founder. Years inside accountancy practice sales through Accountants For Sale, and the relationships that came with them.

What changes

The same numbers get a different answer, depending on who reads them

Most of the businesses being bought in our sectors carry their value in contracts and recurring income: a fee block, a maintenance book, a monitoring base, a service round. A generalist lender sees turnover from a business with no assets, and prices the risk of not understanding it. A specialist who has funded that kind of business before already knows which questions matter and how to answer them.

Bank of England figures for June 2026 put the effective rate on new bank loans to SMEs at 6.36%, against 5.42% across UK private non-financial corporations as a whole[1]. That gap is a measure of what being read correctly is worth, before anyone has talked about how much you can borrow.

  • A stronger case

    Someone who has funded your sector before knows what a lender needs to see and how to present it. A case built that way can support more borrowing, or a sharper rate, than the same figures put in front of a generalist.

  • A quicker answer

    They already know which lenders are open to your kind of business and what those lenders will ask, so nobody is learning your sector at your expense while the seller waits.

  • A structure that fits the deal

    Deferred consideration, working capital from day one, refinancing what is already there. The people we introduce you to work with these shapes every week, and can build the facility around the deal rather than the other way round.

None of that is a promise. It is what tends to happen when the case is made by someone who understands the business, and it is the reason Reads exists.

Simon Read talking through a deal with a buyer across a table

Where it comes from

Built on years of selling businesses, not on a lender's price list

Simon Read has spent years selling accountancy practices through Accountants For Sale, and before that ran operating businesses as a managing director with full profit and loss responsibility. That is a long time watching owner-managed businesses change hands and get funded, or fail to, and noticing which of those outcomes was about the business and which was about who was asked.

Along the way the same few people kept turning up: the ones who read a fee block or a maintenance contract correctly, and got the deal done. Those relationships are what Reads Commercial Finance is built on. Not a directory of lenders. Specific people, in specific sectors, whose work we have seen.

About Simon
  • Twelve years in UK business sales
  • Runs Accountants For Sale, the specialist brokerage for UK accountancy practices
  • Former managing director with full profit and loss responsibility
  • Published contributor to Business and Accountancy Daily on commercial finance and succession
  • Ambassador, FORE Business

Where we know the people

Six sectors, each with its own specialists

Accountancy practices is the one we know best. The other five raise the same questions in different clothes: what the contracts are worth, what walks out of the door on completion, and how a lender who understands that will fund it.

How it works

One conversation, then the right introduction

  1. Tell us what you are buying. The sector, the rough size, and how you expect to pay for it. A short note or ten minutes on the phone is enough.
  2. We work out who is right for it. Not a list. One or two people whose work in that sector we have seen, chosen for this deal.
  3. You speak to them directly. From there it is their conversation with you. They assess the deal, advise you and arrange the finance, under their own permissions, and we step back.

Reads makes the introduction and nothing else. There is no obligation to proceed with anyone you are introduced to. How it works has the full picture, including the questions people usually ask first.

Before you talk to anyone

Worth reading first

Most of what goes wrong in an acquisition happens before the funding conversation starts. These are the pieces people tell us they wish they had read earlier.

There is more in the guides, the articles and the buyer journey, and the funding types and deal structures sections explain the products and the shapes they come in.

Tell us what you are buying

The sector and the shape of the deal is all it takes to know who you should be talking to. We come back to you having spoken to the right people.

Tell us what you need