About Oren
Experience on both sides of the handover.
Oren gives owners of successful companies a credible, long-term home for what they have built.
What Oren is
Built to be a good owner.
Oren buys established, profitable British companies and keeps them. That is the whole of the intention, and everything about how it is set up follows from it: privately owned, answerable to nobody outside, and under no obligation ever to sell anything on.
An owner selling a company they built is deciding a great deal more than a price. They are thinking about the people who stayed through the difficult years, the customers who know them by name, and whether the business will still be recognisable once it is no longer theirs.
They are rarely looking for a buyer with a plan for their company. They are looking for one who will understand it first.
Buy good businesses. Look after what makes them successful. Help them prosper for the next generation. It is not a complicated idea. It is simply an unusual one to hold to consistently.
Rhian Blake
Founder
Most buyers have never done what you have done.
Rhian Blake has done it more than once.
She has built companies, grown them and sold them — and has spent the years in between doing the unglamorous parts: winning the work, keeping the staff, buying other businesses and making them fit, and being the person everything came back to.
She began in corporate law, on M&A. Since then she has run companies internationally, bought and integrated others, sat on boards through a sale, and been the seller herself. There is not much in a process she has not seen from one side or the other.
A sale can be financially excellent and still mark the end of the most important period of someone’s working life. Both are true at the same time. Anyone who has been through it knows the second part is not sentimentality; it is the part that keeps you awake in the weeks before completion.
Having been there changes how you buy. It is why the first questions here are about the people and the customers, why nothing is agreed that cannot be explained to the workforce afterwards, and why we would rather lose a transaction than promise an owner something we do not intend to hold to.
How we are set up
Privately owned. Directly run.
We are the buyer
Oren buys for itself. We are not brokering a transaction for somebody else, and not going out to raise the money once terms are agreed.
We answer to ourselves
Whoever you speak to can make the decision. Nothing waits on a committee elsewhere, and nothing is agreed subject to someone else’s approval.
No date in the diary
No fund life, no vintage year, no forced sale. We can hold a company for as long as we are the right owner for it, which is the point.
Properly funded
Transactions are funded from our own capital together with acquisition debt arranged with UK lenders. We set the funding out, and evidence it, before anyone is asked to commit to anything.
Good advisers
Corporate finance, legal and diligence advisers are instructed alongside us on every transaction, so a process moves at the pace a seller and their team expect.
Bigger than one person
Oren is built to outlast the person who founded it. Businesses are run by their own management, and the advisers around a transaction are experienced and properly instructed.
How we behave
Four things we hold to.
Say what we think, early
Including when the answer is no. An owner’s time is the one thing a buyer cannot give back.
No late surprises
The offer we make is the offer we intend to complete on. If diligence turns up something that genuinely changes the value, we will say so at once and explain it, rather than saving it for the week before completion.
Understand it first
The strengths of an established business are not always where an outsider expects to find them.
Own it properly
A business is not a position to be managed. Once it is ours, its employees, customers and reputation are our responsibility.
What comes next
The next owner becomes part of the story.
An owner handing over a company is not ending its history. They are choosing who writes the next part of it, and on what terms.
For management, that means an owner interested in the substance of the business rather than in proving something by changing it.
If you would rather form a view of us before anything else happens, that is exactly the right instinct.
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