Beauhurst Webinar – How to Find Companies that are Likely to Exit

Contents

1. Link to Webinar Recording from February 2025
2. Search Templates
3. Executive Summary
4. Tweaks to add to searches
5. Methodology and Data
6. Patents Footnote
7. Get in touch + Similar Articles

Watch our Webinar recording from February 2025:

Recording:

https://my.demio.com/recording/LzzGCF9c

Search Templates:

Finding Companies

• Likely to Acquire another company
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• Likely to be Acquired, with funding
• Likely to be Acquired, with financial growth
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• Likely to IPO, base template
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• For potential tweaks to the above templates, see below
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• Finding People associated with these organisations

  • Large Shareholders
  • C-Suite individuals
  • Founders
  • Experienced Non-Executive Directors
    ​On top of the above People search templates, you’ll need to add on the criteria “Collections contained in include” as follows:
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    1. Build the company search you want, and save it to a Collection
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    2. Build the people search you want – eg. founders with over 40% shareholding in a business
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    3. On the line that reads Add shareholding criteria OR Add company position criteria OR Add directorship criteria, add the criteria “Shareholding/Person/ Directorship is in a company where”
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    4. Scroll down to “Collections contained in include” and choose the company collection you built earlier.
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Executive Summary

A brief summary of the findings and reasoning for the search templates
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​​Companies that acquired another company in 2024 commonly:

• Have scaled up (in either headcount or turnover), been mentioned in a high growth list, and had some form of equity or debt funding
• Were based in the United Kingdom (particularly the South of England) or the United States
• Had over 100 employees, turnover of over £30M, and over £1M in EBITDA, Operating Profit and Cash
• Were valued at over £10M, and have received over £6M in equity funding
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Companies that were acquired by another company in 2024 commonly:

• Were based in the South of England or the North West
• Had over £15M in revenue, but headcount varied greatly from a median of 22 to an average of 88.
• Were valued at around £2.5-£3M, and for those who have received funding, they received around £1M.

Companies that have IPO’d since 2021 were commonly:

• Receiving 3 or more fundraisings ahead of their exit – often totalling in excess of £10M
• Valued at over £15M, with the mean average exceeding £250M, likely fuelled by the 4 companies valued at £1B+
• Employing over 70 people, but this ranged greatly, and be turning over at least £10M
• Surprisingly, EBITDA, Net Worth, R&D Expenditure and Grants received all varied greatly, to such a point where they seem to have played no large role in the company’s image ahead of IPO.

Tweaks + Additional Criteria

These are potential ways that you can narrow down your searches to a cohort of companies that are more prevalent to the work you’re undertaking.
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Often, these elements may make a company more likely to be involved in an exit event.

• Significant Positive financial trends
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• Has already acquired a company before
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• Backed by a late stage fund
• Backed by a fund who specialises in exits
  • Specialising in exits defined as having invested in more than 10 companies that have gone on to be acquired or IPO
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• Audited by one of the Big 4 Auditors
• Greater media coverage > News
• Has an active Patent – See the footnote on this
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• Appointment of CFO/ similar with exit track record.
  • This is a people search, for those who have worked at C-suite level at an organisation that was acquired or IPO’d, and now has an active C-suite role elsewhere
• Ageing director

Methodology behind searches

The below is data taken from the Beauhurst platform, upon which the search templates have been built upon.

​IPOs

The underlying data looks at all IPO events from the start of January 2021 until the end of January 2025.

Acquisitions
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The underlying data looks at all acquisitions in 2024 between January 1st and the 15th of November and covers 1184 acquired companies and 997 acquiring companies.
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* Non-UK companies will not be filing financial accounts to Companies House!
** Companies that have not hit £10.2M in turnover are not required to file full accounts to Companies House, so some fields like Turnover or EBITDA may not be filed by all UK companies

* Non-UK companies will not be filing financial accounts to Companies House!
** Companies that have not hit £10.2M in turnover are not required to file full accounts to Companies House, so some fields like Turnover or EBITDA may not be filed by all UK companies
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​​Funding Analysis

Non-Financial Analysis

Signs of growth, innovation and risk

For more information on this, read this page about our Signals!

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​Most common auditors

Most common headquarters location

• On a country level, 71.2% of the Acquiring companies are based in the United Kingdom, followed by the United States (11.9%), Germany (3.8%) and France (1.9%)
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• For the UK-based acquiring companies, 26.7% are based in London, followed by the South East (14.2%), then the North West (12.3%), and Yorkshire and The Humber (7.8%).
  Scotland represented 5.7% of companies, whilst Wales and Northern Ireland represented 4.2% and 1.2% respectively.
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• As for Acquired companies, 31.1% were headquartered in London, followed by the South East (13.1%), North West (9.1%) and the South West (6.8%).
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Tracking Status

• Of the Acquiring companies, 48.5% are Tracked, 45.3% are Not Tracked, and 6.1% are Ceased Tracking
  • Read more here!

Patents Footnote:

Of the 74 IPOs, 12 companies have an active patent (16%).
Whilst this is a relatively small sample size, the companies with at least one active patent, when compared to those without, saw greater valuations, market capitalisations, number and value of funding received.
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Equally, they exited with a lesser turnover, EBITDA, cash in bank and number of employees – one could take from this that the presence of an active patent reduced the barrier to exit and helped increase the company’s valuation.

If you haven’t yet got access to Beauhurst’s Patent data, speak to your Account Manager!

👋Get in touch with the team

For any more information on how to run similar searches yourself, what kind of data Beauhurst has, or how you can run similar analysis, please speak to your Support team – their contact details will be found in the Help tab on your account.

👀Also check out:

2024 Acquisitions Wrapped

Fundraisings, Acquisitions and Valuations

Patents