Mark Dyer

We acquire companies. That is the whole of the business.

How we find them is the unusual part. We write letters, and have done since 1994; last year the office posted 1.25 million of them. Outside the banks I would be surprised if many organisations in Britain send more.

Then we let the phone ring. There is no cold-calling here. Owners get in touch when their own circumstances change, on their timetable, and by then they already know the name.

The calls that still catch me out are the inherited ones. Somebody rings to say a relative has left them a company — and that the relative’s standing instruction, set down years earlier, was to contact The Hacking Trust when the day came.

It is the vehicle we buy through, incorporated in 1997.

The method is patience. We write to the owners on our database and then we wait for them to come back. Few reply inside a month, or a year. We still take calls off letters posted more than twenty years ago — people file them away, then something changes and the letter comes back out of the drawer.

That only works because nothing about us has moved in thirty years: same name, same offer, same terms. We have become a known quantity, and the business now grows off the back of that.

Old family firms, mostly. Second generation, third, occasionally fourth.

The owners who write to us tend to be in one of three positions. They have inherited something they never asked for. They have no relationship with the business and no appetite to run it. Or they have simply had enough.

What they share is a trap: there is no open market for shares in a private limited company. You can own something genuinely valuable, have no way of converting it into money, and nobody obvious to ask. We offer a route out where there usually isn’t one.

We normally take 50% or more. We are flexible on structure, and because the legal team sits in-house we are not waiting weeks on outside solicitors.

What earns a yes is value other people have walked straight past. Inherited companies in particular are undervalued by the very people who own them, because they have only ever thought of the thing as an obligation rather than an asset.

The Randolph side of the family put their name to the bonded edge, aviation fire-suppression systems, match-making machinery, ceremonial swords, garden tools — a long list over a long stretch of years.

I have always been pulled the same way. Stingblade is the first idea I have carried all the way to a finished product, and it will not be the last; there are others I intend to get to.

They all begin identically. I wanted the thing, it did not exist, so I made it. That is the entirety of inventing. Anyone can do it and more people should — the world ends up with more useful objects in it.

Recycled material because there is no sense in putting fresh plastic into the world to solve a problem the sea already has. We could recycle, so we did.

England because it is a British-designed product and I wanted it built here as well. Buyers notice that. This country used to make excellent things, and some of that is worth getting back.

Be up early. Stay fit. Leave substances alone — all they ever do is let you believe you are doing well. Hold a level view of everything, your own results included.

And accept that nothing beats work. Not contacts, not cleverness, not timing. Hours of it, consistently, over years. That is the whole method.

More comfortably than people expect.

The office is built for investigation. We examine companies, assets, ownership and paper trails every day of the week — finding what is buried in a set of records is the job. Turning that on a case almost sixty years old is a change of subject, not of method.

Beyond that there is no real choice in it. The mission gets finished. The full account is at murielmckay.com.

I am not a natural speaker and would not pretend otherwise. What I had to say that day mattered to me, and an audience can always tell the difference between somebody performing and somebody who means it.

The one technique I use came from a professional presenter: do not address the room, address one person at a time.

We want owners who would sell if they could — private companies with no buyer in sight and no market for their shares. That gap is precisely why we exist.

We are straightforward to deal with. We do not demand the warranties and guarantees a trade buyer would insist on, which is unusual and removes most of the pain. And with the legal team in-house, matters move quickly.

If that describes your position, contact the office. The conversation costs nothing.