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: 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. In doing so, Joe realised that a generalist adviser was not able to identify the potential pitfalls of the transaction, nor help him protect against them. Joe often found himself in the position of explaining basic industry concepts to the party running the deal. It was this experience that led Joe to the idea of founding an industry specific M&A practice to ensure that established business owners received high quality, tailored advice.
Ask Lewin where a sale process truly gets stuck, and the answer isn’t what most expect. In the building services and FM markets, active buyers are plentiful; owners often assume that having multiple suitors in their inbox guarantees favourable terms. Yet, the reality is far more complex. The end-to-end M&A journey, spanning onboarding, data room management, and gruelling due diligence, requires precision. Traditional generalist advisers often become a bottleneck; as information passes through them to lawyers and accountants, critical nuance is lost in translation or requires constant re-explanation. This communication breakdown doesn’t just drain time—it erodes momentum and, ultimately, bleeds the seller of their negotiation leverage.
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 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. Martin was directly involved in 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 M&A Director on 22 August, leaving the UK’s most active M&A advisory firm, a K3 Capital Group company. He was not looking to move, however what changed his mind 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.
“What sets us apart is what you cannot find online: what questions does a buyer ask when they sit down with a target? Which due diligence issues have scared them off before? What will they pay a premium for?”
This sector knowledge and specialism 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.