Executing the growth strategy and increasing dividends with Christie Group

Yeah, so the largest business that I mentioned is called Christian Co. Christian Co., for want of a better word, is a bit like a corporate estate agency.

It's our main activity.

We broker the buying and selling of businesses in specialist sectors, but we do it in the mid-market space and we do it at high volume, which I think is underappreciated.

We typically sell well over 1,000 businesses a year.

In fact, on an eight-year average over the last eight years, we've sold 1,000 businesses, even allowing for some slightly softer periods with M&A cycles.

So we do a lot of volume.

We're specialists in those sectors.

And then around that, because we're buying and selling businesses, predominantly selling businesses, we act for vendors most of the time in helping them sell their business.

And then we've got support services that we think are in demand services for the clients that we broker the sale of businesses for.

Finance brokerage, because there'll be other parties to a transaction who need to raise money to make that purchase.

Insurance, because if you're buying a business and starting a business, you need the relevant insurances in place.

If you're taking finance or a commercial mortgage, you ultimately need the life cover like you would in buying a house.

And around those intelligent-led services where we're understanding sectors, there's needs for valuation of those businesses as well, and other consultancy.

So it's a range of services that fit together for owners and operators in those sectors in which we operate with an operational real estate underpin to those businesses.

So it seems to me as though you've got a lot of cross-selling opportunities here.

How much of that your business is cross-selling and how much it is just the main Christian business?

There are cross-selling opportunities and a lot of cross-selling that goes on in terms of referrals of a transaction if you like and the relationships and known relationships within it but I think as a proportion there's opportunity for us to do more Jeremy and We typically finance in our finance brokerage business, for example, which is probably our strongest cross-selling link to the Christian Co. brokerage business.

We typically are acting to broker finance in about 10% of the transactions in which Christian Co. operate.

So it's actually quite a low percentage.

Each of those brands is capable and does generate client flows and client relationships of their own merit.

But where we get examples and opportunities to be able to help a client on multiple aspects, we love to do so.

And we do do that.

And we can point to numerous examples each year of transactions where we can act as the agent in terms of selling a business.

We may have been instructed originally to value the business.

We can't ever value and sell a business at the same time because of conflict.