Experience behind every model.
Jeff Smith brings more than four decades of practical experience in founding, funding, acquiring, managing and selling financial-services businesses.
Practical transaction and funding experience
Jeff Smith is the founder of Acquisitions Advisory Limited. He helps business buyers and owners evaluate acquisitions, funding proposals and investment opportunities through robust, lender-ready financial models.
Between 1989 and 2020, Jeff founded and managed several start-up businesses and successfully took a number of them through to sale. Unlike an adviser whose experience is purely theoretical, Jeff has raised substantial funding for his own businesses: more than £24 million of equity capital and over £300 million of debt.
He also spent approximately 30 years as chief executive of lending businesses operating in the SME and consumer-finance markets.
This combination of operational, transactional and funding experience gives Jeff a practical understanding of what buyers, investors and lenders need from a financial model. A successful acquisition is not simply about agreeing a purchase price. The transaction must leave the business with sufficient cash to operate, invest and meet its repayment obligations under both expected and more difficult trading conditions.
Experience across complex funding transactions
Advising NatWest Markets and major private-equity funds on debt financing for management buyouts and buy-ins.
Advising on the refinancing of substantial private-equity investments.
Supporting the financing of prime commercial-property portfolios worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
Advising on the securitisation of substantial financial-asset portfolios.
Jeff is also the founder of Business Buyers UK, a LinkedIn community bringing together more than 1,500 aspiring and experienced business buyers.
Disciplined analysis for business buyers
Jeff established Acquisitions Advisory to give business buyers access to the kind of disciplined financial analysis normally associated with larger transactions.
The firm prepares lender-ready acquisition and project-finance models that help clients understand what they can afford, how a transaction might be funded and whether the resulting debt can realistically be serviced.
Make the funding case before you commit.
Talk to Jeff about a lender-ready model for your acquisition or project-finance proposal.
Book a Free Consultation