Most advice about selling a business is written for the seller as an individual – the founder, the entrepreneur, the person whose name is on the door. Family businesses complicate that picture, because the person sitting across the table from a buyer isn’t one person. It’s a family, and in my experience families rarely arrive at a sale with the same view of what they want from it.
I’ve sat through enough of these processes to know the pattern. Family shareholding pulls in three directions at once – family, shareholders, management – and all of it has to be understood before a single buyer is approached. The technical work – the diligence, the term sheet, the lawyers – can only run its course once that’s settled. So the hardest negotiation in a family sale often isn’t the one with the buyer, it’s the one the family has with itself, before a buyer is ever in the room.
That’s rarely a straightforward conversation. One generation may be ready to sell; another may want to stay and build. Siblings can disagree on timing, on price, on what “done” even looks like. Left unresolved, those disagreements don’t stay contained, they tend to surface mid-process, usually at the worst possible moment. The market should meet one family, speaking with one voice. Practically, that can mean agreeing early on who speaks for the family as a group, so that valuation expectations, sell-down proportions, and questions of roles and remuneration don’t become potential fatal flaws as negotiations progress. Where some family members intend to stay on, that can even become a selling point – a succession story a buyer will find attractive, rather than a complication to manage around.
There’s also a version of this that doesn’t require choosing between selling everything and selling nothing. A partial sale or recapitalisation, which is a structure we use regularly in the mid-market, lets a family take meaningful cash out while keeping a real stake and a seat at the table, with an institutional partner bringing in capital and governance to fund the next phase of growth. In some cases, the next generation that is operationally involved wants to buy further into the business rather than out of it – we’ve structured gearing for those shareholders specifically, to increase their participation. The logic is simple enough: retained shareholding tends to sharpen everyone’s conviction in the business’s future, on both sides of the table.
Structure matters just as much once a transaction price is actually agreed. Deferred payments, earn-outs, lock-ins, retained equity, management staying on – they determine whether what gets protected is the family’s legacy or just the appearance of it. In my view, rolled equity with genuine governance rights is the most honest version of that protection: the sellers” interests and the buyer’s are aligned by the same instrument, and there’s a real second bite. Earn-outs can work too, as a pricing bridge for a family that genuinely believes in the earnings runway ahead, provided the future numbers are easy to verify rather than argued over later.
Underneath all of it sits a question that has less to do with family than with what kind of capital is doing the buying. A buyer working against a fund’s deadline behaves differently to one that isn’t, and a family can usually feel the difference on the ground long before it shows up in a term sheet. A fund in year seven of a ten-year life needs a realisation, and that changes every decision: capital expenditure with a longer payback loses its appeal, working capital starts getting managed for the exit rather than the business, and growth spending that would depress near-term earnings quietly gets deferred. Corvest has the benefit of using a captive fund model so we can genuinely afford the year that produces a weaker set of numbers and a better business. A family can plant trees with us rather than harvest them to someone else’s calendar.
Our investment in Aquatico is the kind of transaction I point to when asked what a well-handled transition actually looks like. We invested alongside the founding family of the environmental monitoring, testing and reporting business in 2012, in partnership with Agile Capital. Over the following thirteen years, Aquatico expanded beyond South Africa into the rest of the continent and broadened what it offered, with growth funded and nurtured rather than extracted for return, management staying in place throughout, and the technical culture that made the business valuable left intact. When we exited in 2025, the business moved to a strategic owner with the balance sheet to take it further than we could. That is what a good transition looks like – the founders’ work was compounded by the ownership changes, rather than interrupted by them.
Written by Matsebe Thulare, Private Equity Transactor at RMB Corvest