We took our time to find a new home that was right for us, our clients and staff. It has paid off. Our time has been freed up so we can now focus on our clients. We have handed over all responsibility for T&C, compliance and the day to day management of the portfolios. Our clients are happy which is the main thing for us. The deal achieved our objective and we have been able to continue to grow our business.
Corville Financial Services Limited was a family run IFA practice set up by my mother and step-father in the 1980s. Based in York, the business had long standing clients with a focus mainly on Investment and Pension business.
I joined the business in 2012 and my husband Nick joined a year later, to provide succession planning for my parents.
We hadn’t definitely decided to sell the business, it was just one of the options we were considering so that my parents could retire. I was responsible for compliance and all of the regulatory aspects of the business, which was becoming very time consuming. Along with escalating PI costs and increased regulation this all lead us to seriously consider our options and free up time to focus on advising.
We received a call from a Broker and having met with a couple of other acquirers who we didn’t feel comfortable with, we were encouraged to meet AFH. We hadn’t heard of AFH previously, but were very impressed with Alan Hudson when we met him. The AFH business had grown from a small IFA and had a family feel. We felt there was a lot of synergy between AFH and Corville, in the way they wanted to do the best for their clients.
Their extensive inhouse investment team and how they ran their portfolios was of great interest and would allow us to look after more clients and add them onto a service proposition. Having run our own model portfolios since 2009, we were looking for a similar concept and liked the fact that we could retain the existing arrangements for our clients and add an AFH portfolio.
It just felt right and we sold our business to AFH in June 2018 and transferred over with our clients.
We trusted Alan which was refreshing having found other acquirers wishy washy, or they seemed to be presenting obstacles. The deal panned out exactly as Alan described. It completed quickly and was a very smooth process through the due dilligence stage which was handled very professionally by the Management and Acquisition team who kept us up to date throughout the process.
Our clients have all stayed with us and settled into AFH. We retained our offices and all of our staff which pleased the clients.