M&A advisor for UK SME owners

Mastella is a senior-led M&A advisor for UK owner-managed businesses worth £5M to £50M in enterprise value. We work on confidential, off-market sell-side mandates, management buyouts, growth-capital rounds, and selective buy-side work for clients running active acquisition programmes. The full service detail is on the services page and the stage-by-stage process on the process page.

Within sell-side, we handle full sales, majority sales, minority sales, and structured transitions including dual-track processes that combine MBO and trade-sale tracks. Within growth capital, we work on minority rounds with PE and family office investors, majority rounds, and pre-exit funding designed to support a value-creation push before a planned sale.

Within buy-side, we typically work with established acquirers on specific targeted acquisitions rather than open-ended buy-side mandates. We have run buy-side mandates for boards executing buy-and-build strategies in defined sub-sectors.

We do not do general business broking, off-the-shelf valuation reports for tax purposes, or compliance-driven work. Where those are what you need, we will refer you to specialist firms we trust.

We work with owner-managed UK businesses worth between £5M and £50M in enterprise value, across six sectors: business services, healthcare services, light industrials, logistics and distribution, professional services, and tech-enabled services. See the sectors hub for the detailed sub-sector coverage.

Our typical client is a founder or partner group 12 to 24 months from a target exit, growth-capital round or capital event. The financials are real, the team is credible, and the business has reached the point where a structured competitive process across the right buyer pool will materially outperform either inbound approaches or a single-buyer negotiation.

We do not work with businesses below £5M EV — at that scale, a quality broker network typically serves owners better than a senior-led firm can. We do not run mandates where the owner is committed to accepting a specific approach already on the table; that is execution support, which fits a different mandate type and a different fee profile.

We do work hard to be straight in the first conversation. Forty-five minutes, no obligation, with an honest view on whether what you want to achieve is realistic and whether Mastella's model fits your situation.

The traditional UK lower mid-market M&A advisor model relies on senior advisors winning mandates and then delegating the substantive delivery work to junior teams. Senior advisors reappear at key buyer meetings and at completion. Owners typically find out about this model only when they are inside it.

Mastella is structured around the opposite model. Every conversation that matters runs through the principal. Buyer mapping, financial normalisation, IM drafting, negotiation, completion mechanics — none of these are delegated. A small in-house team and a proprietary technology layer support the senior delivery rather than substitute for it.

This is funded by the retainer-led fee model rather than a deal-commission model. A high monthly retainer funds genuinely senior time across the mandate. A commission-only structure economically forces firms to deliver junior-led work to make the unit economics work, regardless of how the mandate is sold.

For owners running a single most important transaction in their commercial lives, the difference between senior-led and junior-led delivery is the difference between confidence and concern at every meeting that matters. It is also, in our experience, consistently the difference between a deal that closes at expectation and a deal that re-trades at completion.

If a senior-led process fits your situation, book a confidential conversation. Forty-five minutes, no obligation.