About
The people who fund your sector, and how we came to know them
Reads Commercial Finance came out of years of selling accountancy practices and other owner-managed businesses, and out of one question that arrived at the same point in every sale: who is going to fund this? The answer, over and over, was a specific person who understood the sector. Reads was set up to put buyers in front of those people.
The introduction itself is not the valuable part. Anyone can make one. What matters is knowing which specialists have funded a business like yours before, and going to those people rather than to whoever is nearest.
Simon Read
The person making the introduction
Simon Read has spent his career in business sales, working with owners selling up and buyers taking over: accountancy practices through Accountants For Sale, and trade services businesses in fire and security, HVAC, pest control, electrical contracting and facilities management.
In that work the funding question is never far away. A buyer finds the right business and then has to work out how to pay for it. An owner agrees a price and then waits to find out whether the buyer's funding holds up. Simon watched a lot of good deals slow down or fall over at exactly that point, usually because the proposition reached the wrong lender in the wrong format.
Simon's part is the judgement about who should be looking at it. The specialist he introduces you to does the assessing, the advising and the arranging, under their own permissions. What Simon brings is a working knowledge of which whole-of-market broker firms are genuinely good at what, built up from watching them do it on real transactions.
That is what an introduction from Reads is worth: a considered view on who should be looking at your deal first, from someone who has watched the alternatives.
The decision
Why an introduction, rather than another broker
It was considered, and rejected, for a straightforward reason. Doing broking properly means permissions, professional indemnity, compliance overhead and a full-time commitment to keeping current with a lender market that moves constantly. Doing it badly means a client gets a worse outcome than they would have got from someone who does it every day.
The four broker firms on our panel do it every day. Introducing you to them takes minutes and costs you nothing at the introduction stage. Building a fifth version of what they already do well would take years and would not be better.
So the position is deliberate: Reads finds the right person for the deal, and that person does the work.
How we choose
What a broker has to be, to be on the panel
Every firm on our panel is a whole-of-market broker. Four things, and they are the same four we would want if we were the one enquiring.
- It listens before it proposes anything, and the first conversation is about your business rather than its products.
- It keeps what you tell it confidential, without needing to be asked.
- It asks for the paperwork it needs and not a pile more, and it says clearly what happens next.
- It promises only what it can deliver, and it comes back to you quickly either way.
A broker that gets one of those wrong on an introduction we made stops being on the panel. That is the whole of our quality control, and it is why we work with a small panel of whole-of-market broker firms rather than forty.
Where the knowledge came from
Years inside practice sales, and what they taught us about lenders
Simon Read has spent years inside accountancy practice sales through Accountants For Sale, his other business. Sitting on that side of the table for long enough teaches you two things that are hard to pick up any other way.
The first is what a buyer is really buying. A fee block is not turnover. It is a set of relationships with reasons behind them, and the reasons are what decide whether it survives the change of ownership. The same is true of a maintenance book, a monitoring base or a service round, which is why the six sectors on this site have more in common than they look.
The second is which lenders understand that and which do not. You find out by watching deals go to funders who had never seen one before, and watching what came back. Over time you learn the names worth going to, sector by sector. That list is the actual asset here, and it is the reason an introduction from us is worth more than an introduction from a directory.
So the short version is this. We know this market, and we know specific people who have funded a business like yours before. That is what you get from the introduction and it is the only thing we claim.
Knowing the market is a different thing from being the one who arranges the facility, and why Reads sets out where that line sits.
Reads Advice Partners Limited
Reads Commercial Finance is a trading style of Reads Advice Partners Ltd, company number 12124192, registered at 7 Bell Yard, London, WC2A 2JR.
The full position on what we do and do not do is set out in our terms of business, and the legal statement appears in the footer of every page on this site.