Many founders sell companies because the move fits into a financial need or plan. But sometimes, life simply takes you in and out of phases where running a company may or may not be a good fit.

Fleur Hicks exited her first business, the digital media agency Pass It On Media, in 2011 to focus on motherhood. Just over 12 years later, another life shift would push her to sell her next business, M&A consultancy Onefourzero.

Onefourzero grew out of Hicks’s experience with her first exit and years of consulting with other firms on exit preparedness. The UK-based company provided buyer-side digital due diligence for private equity and venture capital firms.

Yet even for a company that guided other businesses through mergers and acquisitions, when it came time to sell in 2023, the process posed unexpected challenges.

How Onefourzero was acquired by Palladium Digital

Hicks had managed to build 7-figure companies, but in several pivotal moments, the stress of running a business didn’t leave room for the next steps she wanted to take.

In 2011, after building a career as a marketing and management consultant, she accepted a buyout and moved into traditional employment and then consulting, before founding Onefourzero in 2016 with silent partners Luke Kennedy and Robin Grainger.

The tech-enabled consultancy operated across four offices in London, New York, Boston and Paris, but kept a small staff: 17 employees and four contractors at the time of the sale.

The company raised $1.3 million (£1 million) in 2021 through angel investors, but Hicks said she wishes she would have raised earlier than she did. She used external capital to buy out her non-practicing co-founders in 2020. That move let her redistribute equity to make the company more appealing to potential buyers.

Shortly after that buyout, the company took on debt to fund growth and quadrupled in size over the next 18 months. By the time of the sale, it was earning about $3 million USD (£2.4 million GBP) in revenue.

In 2023, she was ready to step out of her position as the sole leader of the company and spend more time with family. And in retrospect, she named another reason she no longer wanted to sustain the work of running a company.

“I also suspect that I was going through the menopause, which was as yet undiagnosed,” said Hicks. “I was feeling very tired, depressed and sad all the time. I thought it was to do with the business stress, when in fact it may have been hormones.”

The buyer, private equity consultancy Next 15 Group, kicked off the eventual sale to acquire Onefourzero under its digital change management brand Palladium Digital.

“We had known each other for a while,” said Hicks, “and I assume they had an acquisition strategy for growth under the Next 15 Group that included acquiring SMEs to merge into the existing portfolio.”

Hicks negotiated a 7-figure sale that included an earn-out, and Hicks was hired as chief commercial officer at Palladium to assist the transition for the next 10 months.

Why due diligence is harder when you sell to a public company

Throughout Hicks’s tenure, Onefourzero became highly respected in the industry, operating primarily in the large capitalization and mid-market private equity space, and boasting clients including BlackRock, Apax and KKR.

Even with that extensive experience in private equity, Hicks said due diligence was unexpectedly complex when she sold to Next 15, a publicly-traded company in the U.K.

”I thought I had the data room in a good place, but it was only a good place from a P.E. perspective,” she said. “Public companies need much more detail.”

Public companies have to comply with stricter regulations than private companies, so the diligence required more specific details, receipts and proof of activity for years of work than Hicks was accustomed to in P.E.

“It was intense, long, hard, and at the end you don’t feel jubilant; you feel deflated,” she said. “But it was worth it.”

The experience hasn’t scared Hicks away from diligence, though. Since leaving Palladium in January 2024, she’s continued M&A advising and founded Hicks Global Consulting. It offers similar consulting services to her past work, but focuses on automated, tech-led due diligence as a subscription-based service, which provides more predictable recurring revenue.

No matter how much you think you know going into a sale, Hicks recommends, “Ask people for advice before you do it. Speak to people who have been through it, ask questions.”

She also offered a note from her view into the buyer side of M&A. “Don’t feel like [the buyers] are the dominant force; you are selling your business to them and they want it, so ask for what you want, too.”