About
Simon Read
Twelve years in UK business sales, most of it spent watching owner-managed businesses change hands and get funded, or fail to get funded, and learning which of those outcomes was really about the business and which was about who was asked.
Background
An operator before a dealmaker
Before founding Reads Advice Partners Limited, Simon held managing director positions with full profit and loss responsibility, running operating businesses rather than observing them from the outside.
That background changes how a deal reads. He knows what a working business looks like from the inside, which debt feels manageable on the day the money lands, and which covenants become a problem twelve months later when the cycle turns. It is a different starting point from someone whose whole career has been on the lending side of the table.
It is also why this site is blunt about the arithmetic. The recurring theme across every sector page here is that the multiple sets the price and the margin sets the borrowing, and those are two different numbers. That is not a clever observation. It is what you notice after watching enough buyers agree a price without doing the second calculation.
Accountancy practices
The sector he knows best
Simon also runs Accountants For Sale, a specialist brokerage for UK accountancy practices. Years on that side of the table is where most of the specific knowledge on this site came from: what a fee block is really worth, how clawback gets drafted and how often it fails to bite, and which lenders read recurring fee income correctly.
The pattern turned out to travel. A monitoring base in fire and security, a maintenance book in HVAC and a contract round in pest control raise the same questions as a fee block, and get the same blank look from a lender who has not funded one before. The deepest page on this site is accountancy practices, and it is deepest for a reason.
If you are looking for a practice to buy rather than funding one you have found, Accountants For Sale is where that conversation belongs. This business only deals with the funding side.
Public record
Active in the conversation
- Published contributor to Business and Accountancy Daily on commercial finance and business succession.
- Has presented on commercial finance on radio.
- Ambassador, FORE Business, and active across the UK business networking community.
- Former managing director with full profit and loss responsibility.
These are not decorative. Being known in the right rooms is precisely what makes an introduction worth having, because the people worth introducing you to take calls from people they know.
Where the line sits
What Simon does, and what the specialist does
Simon's job is to understand the deal and know who should be looking at it. The specialist he introduces you to assesses it, advises you, arranges the facility and sets the terms, under their own permissions. Neither Simon nor Reads Commercial Finance is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, and neither pretends to be.
What he does is understand the deal, go to the lenders and brokers who have funded that kind of business before, and come back to you with who can fund it and what they will want to see. Every enquiry starts with him, and none of them is handed off to somebody who has not read it.
We introduce buyers who are acquiring through a limited company or a NewCo. If you are buying personally, as a sole trader or as a partnership, we will point you to an authorised firm directly instead.
Speak to Simon about what you are buying
Every enquiry starts with him. Tell us the sector and the shape of the deal and he goes to the people who fund that kind of business.