Adelaide, SA
Financial due diligence in Adelaide, referred out.
A large share of Adelaide acquisitions are succession sales: long-held family businesses changing hands as owners retire. They can be excellent buys, and their books need a particular kind of untangling by someone who does it often.
The Adelaide acquisition market
Adelaide's market is steadier than the east coast: manufacturing and food businesses, wholesale and distribution operators, and service businesses held by the same family for decades. Long ownership produces exactly the accounting habits due diligence exists to unwind.
In a thirty-year family business, the books and the business have usually grown into each other. Family wages that do not match the work performed, premises owned by a related trust at a rent set years ago, vehicles and insurances run through the company, and depreciation policies that quietly minimised tax rather than reflected the assets. None of it is sinister, but all of it distorts the earnings a buyer is paying a multiple on. Rebuilding what the business earns under arm's-length ownership is the whole job, and it is worth naming every one of those items when you brief someone.
What this means for Adelaide buyers
The conversation runs by video, and the introduction follows within two business days. On a succession sale we will usually say to bring the tax and structuring discipline in earlier than you would on an arm's length purchase, because how a retiring owner wants to exit and how you want to hold it are the same negotiation.
The disciplines, what each one covers and how an introduction runs are on the financial due diligence page.
Adelaide questions
A transaction services specialist, and brief them on family wages, related-party rent and private expenses specifically. It is normal and it is manageable, but it is more normalisation work than a recently-traded business needs, and it is worth confirming that the scope you are quoted actually includes it rather than assuming.
Usually in your favour, and tell the specialist to go to them early. A long-standing accountant can typically evidence or explain an adjustment in one conversation that would otherwise take a week of reconstruction. Ask your specialist what happens to the fee if the records turn out to be materially incomplete, before they start rather than after.
Yes, and the difference is timing. Tax and structuring advice needs to come earlier than it would on an arm's length purchase, because a retiring owner often cares as much about how they exit as what they get, and that is the same conversation as how you should hold it. Settle it before the contract is drafted.
Buying in Adelaide?
Tell us about the business and where you are up to. We will tell you which disciplines the deal needs, which it does not, and make the introduction. No charge and nothing to sign.