The owners who keep buildings running rarely get enough credit. Cleaning, waste and recycling, drainage, water hygiene and legionella control, pest control, fire and life safety, HVAC, lifts: none of it is glamorous, all of it is statutory or close to it, and it does not stop for a season, a downturn or a pandemic. These are exactly the businesses acquirers have spent the last three years competing for.
When an owner starts thinking about a sale, whether six months or three years out, the real list is long: stakeholder expectations, keeping the team steady, director alignment, what actually moves the valuation, which buyers fit, and how to have any of these conversations without competitors finding out.
That gap, between what owners actually want and what most of the M&A market offers, is why DealFlowAgent exists. Joe Lewin built and sold his own company before founding the firm, growing it to up to 30 staff at peak season with more than 600 owned vehicles, and saw the process from the seller’s side directly. Like most advisers, the firm began sector-agnostic, before Lewin concluded you cannot build deep buyer relationships, or earn the trust of serial acquirers, by dabbling across everything. So it niched down hard, into building services, facilities management and healthcare only.
Ask Lewin where a sale process actually gets stuck, and the answer is not what people expect. “It is not really the paperwork,” he says. “The hardest part is finding and converting a genuine pool of buyers who are qualified, interested and good actors, not just names replying to a teaser. And once you are in a process, every time information passes from seller to advisor to lawyer, something gets lost and has to be re-explained. That is where weeks disappear.”
The team
Martin Watson, MIET MIFSM, has now formally joined DealFlowAgent as Senior Building Services & FM Advisor. He is Chairman of both the Fire Industry Association and the British Security Industry Association, the only person in the UK to hold both roles at once, and spent over a decade in senior leadership at Mitie, latterly as Industry Liaison Director for fire and security, growing it from £7 million to past £500 million in revenue, including Mitie’s £366 million acquisition of Marlowe plc.
“Business owners in these sectors deserve a specialist adviser through the whole journey to a sale, from valuation and business optimisation through to buyer access,” says Watson, who advises DealFlowAgent in a personal, non-partisan capacity given his industry roles.
Duncan Moore joins as Head of M&A on 22 August, leaving the UK’s largest M&A advisory firm, a K3 Capital Group company, having been picked from 260 applicants. He was not looking to move. What changed his mind, in his words, was watching a firm run sale processes the way he had always argued they should be run: sector-deep rather than spread thin, AI doing the analytical grind so senior people stay on the deal rather than delegating it to an associate juggling seven others, and a growth runway across the UK and US that most established firms simply do not have in front of them.
Day to day, that specialism shows up in the detail. Within building services the firm covers cleaning, waste management and recycling, commercial plumbing and drainage, water hygiene and legionella, pest control, fire safety, HVAC, electrical and lift maintenance. Testing, inspection, compliance and planned maintenance is exactly the recurring, compliance-driven revenue that makes a business attractive to acquirers, considerably more so than one-off project work.
Buyer relationships sit at the centre of how the firm operates: a network of more than 13,000 self-registered buyers, each with defined search criteria, built from structured conversations rather than scraped from LinkedIn.
“Anyone can find out whether a buyer is funded, that’s on the fund’s website,” Lewin says. “What you cannot find online is what happens once a buyer sits down with a target: which due diligence issues have scared them off before, what customer concentration makes them walk, what contract length they will pay a premium for.”
That kind of trust is not given lightly. It comes from showing up. Consistently. In the right rooms.
Some of that room-time is public record: DealFlowAgent has exhibited at The Facilities Event, Interschutz, The Fire Safety Event, The Security Event and Fire Safety Matters Live in Coventry.
The firm is currently working with owners at both ends of the spectrum: some ready to go to market now, others 6 to 24 months out and using the time to systemise internal operations, reduce key-person dependency and move the metrics buyers actually price.