Sell, Buy or Value a Recruitment Agency
Welcome to Recruitment Agency Sales, specialist business brokers for the UK recruitment industry, with over 25 years’ experience of mergers & acquisitions. We help recruitment agency owners value, prepare and sell their businesses, and introduce established recruitment companies to suitable buyers. Our team combines extensive recruitment-sector experience with specialist business brokerage and M&A expertise. Contact us today for a confidential discussion about your agency.
Recruitment Agency Sales
Thinking about selling your recruitment business?
We provide a confidential service specifically for recruitment agency owners. We prepare an anonymous sales profile, market your business to suitable registered buyers and manage introductions through to negotiation and completion.
Under our model there is no introduction or success fee payable by the seller.
Recruitment Agency Valuations
What Is Your Recruitment Agency Worth?
We provide market valuations and exit strategies. Recruitment agency valuations require more than applying a generic multiple to profit. We consider adjusted EBITDA, net fee income, permanent and temporary recruitment activity, client concentration, management structure, owner dependence, recurring revenue, contractor numbers, growth trends and current buyer demand.
Recruitment Agency Acquisitions
Looking to acquire an established recruitment business?
We maintain a database of buyers ranging from individual recruitment professionals and management teams through to existing recruitment groups, investors and trade purchasers. Register with us to receive details of suitable opportunities as they become available.
Why Choose Recruitment Agency Sales?
Recruitment sector experience
We understand permanent, temporary, contract and executive recruitment businesses and the different factors buyers consider when assessing them.
Specialist buyer database
We maintain contact with individuals, recruitment companies, investors and strategic buyers actively looking for recruitment-sector acquisitions.
No seller success fee
Under our model, sellers do not pay us an introduction or completion fee.
Practical deal experience
We assist with buyer introductions, negotiations and deal structures while working alongside the parties’ accountants, solicitors and other professional advisers.
How We Sell Recruitment Agencies
A confidential, structured process designed to introduce your recruitment agency to suitable buyers and help move the transaction from initial discussion to completion.
Confidential Discussion
Tell us about your recruitment agency, your objectives and your preferred timescale.
Assessment and Valuation
We discuss likely market value, saleability and any issues that could affect a transaction.
Prepare the Business for Market
We prepare an anonymous profile highlighting the key commercial features of the agency without identifying it publicly.
Approach Suitable Buyers
We market the opportunity to registered and carefully selected buyers who may have a genuine interest in the business.
Introductions and Negotiations
Interested buyers receive further information subject to confidentiality requirements. We coordinate enquiries, meetings and offers.
Heads of Terms to Completion
Once terms are agreed, solicitors and accountants undertake the formal legal, financial and tax work. We remain involved to help keep the transaction moving.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. You don’t need any sector experience at all to run or own a recruitment agency. If you are doing permanent work only then this may not be too much concern, but if your company does temporary too then it will make things a bit more complicated. There is nothing to stop you owning it, but you will need plenty of experience to keep a temporary desk going – its high stress level work.
For a further discussion on this, please get in touch with us and we would be happy to talk through what you need to do, as well as give you recommendations as to how to do it.
Recruitment companies will often take between 6 and 12 months to achieve a sale. It is quite different to other sectors – accountants can usually achieve a sale within 3 weeks (for businesses with less than £1 million turnover). It quite often depends on how the seller and buyer come to market. If the buyer is in desperate need of a purchase, or the seller needs to offload their business quickly for tax or financial reasons, things can move very quickly indeed. Contact us to discuss your business and see what we can do to help.
If you are seller, we do not charge any fees, unless you require our premium services including valuations.
Buyers only pay us a fee if they conclude a deal with a seller. We agree what this fee will be at the outset – it is a fixed fee, not a percentage.
For sellers there are no hidden fees, exit penalties or advertising costs. We are an ethical broker and we want to be different to the majority of brokers out there who frontload their fees to sellers and do very little to market businesses out to buyers.
Lets face it, there are a lot of websites out there all pointing to different multiples for valuing your recruitment agency. If you type the question into Google, the answer is usually that any recruitment agency is worth at least 6 x EBITDA (lets take the easier definition of net fee income – ie your turnover figure).
So if we take the figure of £300,000 in annual net fee income, is your agency really worth £1.8 million?
What do you think? Would you pay £1.8 million for a recruitment agency that may have 20 staff, it may have 2 members of staff. There may be 3 clients, there may also be 400 clients. Your database may contain 50 contractors, or you may have built up a bank of 3,000.
At the end of the day, your recruitment agency is worth what a buyer will pay for it, and no-one in their right mind is going to pay £1.8 million for a recruitment agency specialising in say general permanent recruitment at a junior end, with very limited profit margins and wholly dependent on the connections the owner has built up. Its common sense, although unfortunately this can go out of the window when agency owners start applying accountancy multiples that are mostly pie in the sky.
Your agency is a service business. You have no assets to sell, you have the professional capability of your staff and yourself to offer a buyer. What a buyer is prepared to pay for that capability depends on a lot of factors that all affect the likely sale price.
Multiplying figures by other figures and coming up with something utterly random and unjustified by physical evidence is very unlikely to reflect reality.
If you would like a real world valuation based on your circumstances, please get in touch.
RAS Recruitment Agency Sales was established in 2024 as a separate arm of our main brokerage company, Jonathan Fagan Business Brokers Limited. We have been acting for buyers & sellers of UK professional service businesses for over 20 years and RAS Recruitment Agency Sales is our specialist recruitment business sales service.
Our owners are both experienced recruiters (FIRP and Cert RP qualified) with over 40 years legal and financial recruitment experience between them.
Recruitment Agency Sales is part of the Ten Percent Group of companies, and we are committed to donating 10% of annual net profits to charity via the Ten Percent Foundation. All the businesses within the group are signed up to this pledge. Since 2000 we have donated over £250,000 to the Ten Percent Foundation, a charitable trust based in the UK and registered with the Charity Commission.
A Business with a Social Purpose
Recruitment Agency Sales is part of the Ten Percent Group.
The group has a longstanding commitment to donating 10% of annual net profits to charity, with donations distributed through the Ten Percent Foundation to charities and community organisations.
Thinking About Selling Your Recruitment Agency?
Whether you are ready to sell now or simply want to understand your options, we are happy to have an initial confidential discussion. There is no obligation to put your business on the market.