It’s a patriotic lament, and had ARM been swallowed up by another British firm, there would have been no such outcry. So the question is, are we as a nation simply not geared up to buy businesses from one another?
We’re certainly not short of entreprenuers (and neither is Japan; the founder of Softbank is an entrepreneur by the name of Masayoshi Son). The NACFB’s own survey results suggest that we’re not running low on lenders or on money that’s cued up for lending. Perhaps the only thing that is missing in the UK is a culture of sizing up other people’s businesses as investments. If we look at a business as a big fish we need to co-exist with – instead of a smaller fish to be swallowed up – then is that actually such a bad thing?
The NACFB’s own lead generation website offers SMEs ten categories to choose between when we start to pass enquiries through filters to find the right broker for them. They are the top ten categories that we found we needed over the years the system has been refined, and critically, “I wish to purchase another pre-existing business” is not among them. On the occasions when small businesses want to tick that option and are disappointed it isn’t there, they tend to phone us and we help them. But if, on the other hand, a business wants to sell up, we can’t reach out to that business to steer it in a certain direction – that would fall well outside our Association’s remit.
Perhaps this doesn’t really matter, though. This has always been a nation of idea-creators, since before an Englishman imagined how he might put a static steam engine onto the centuries-old technology of a pair of rails and the millennia-old technology of wheels. Two hundred years later, if the UK continues to invent things and then turns those ideas into cash at a suitable time, who’s being harmed?
The idea that as a nation we have to hold on to things we used to do is one that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Where is the outcry that we can no longer buy a made-in-Britain camera or television set? There is a positive aspect in the way British entrepreneurs move on. So long as one ideas-factory is replaced by another and another and another, then there is not much damage done when an ARM or a Cadbury’s is bought up by an overseas company.
Our only concern should be when British companies want to buy up other British companies and cannot find the finance to do it. As ever, that is where the NACFB has a part to play.
