Your firm is worth something. Or it is worth nothing. Do you know which?

And there are two ways to get this wrong, pulling in opposite directions.

The first is the surveyor above. Firms that are genuinely worth something, with goodwill, recurring work, and a real client base, owned by people who have no idea, because nobody ever showed them how to find out. Recent surveying transactions have landed around six times annual earnings at the upper end, supported by recurring revenue and a credible client list. That is an asset. And it is walking around unvalued, unprotected, and unplanned for.

The second way is the opposite mistake, and it is just as common. Owners who are certain their firm is worth a tidy sum, and are wrong. Because when you look closely, the value was never in the firm. It was in a person. The lead partner who holds every key relationship. The one surveyor whose name actually wins the instructions. The book that follows an individual, not the brand. When that person leaves, retires, or simply stops answering the phone, the clients go with them and the “business” turns out to have been one desk and a reputation that cannot be sold.

A buyer sees this instantly. The first question any serious acquirer asks is not what your turnover is. It is what happens to your revenue the day after you walk out. If the honest answer is “most of it leaves with me,” then the firm is not an asset. It is a job that ends when you do.

So the real work is not just finding out what your firm is worth. It is finding out whether the value sits in the business or in you, and if it sits in you, doing something about it while you still have time. Documented processes. Client relationships spread across the team. A second name clients trust. The unglamorous things that turn a person into a practice.

Run-off cover

Then there is the part that catches even the firms that have planned. Run-off professional indemnity cover. When a regulated firm stops trading, it must carry six years of run-off PII. The rules changed in July 2025, and most owners I speak to still do not know how. The consumer-claims portion of run-off cover, the part that protects homeowners, now has to be built into your premium while you are still trading. So for residential firms, that piece no longer lands as a lump sum at closure. That is the good news.

The commercial tail is a different story. For firms doing any meaningful commercial work, the run-off cost at cessation can still run to several times your previous year’s primary premium, paid as a single sum at the exact moment you stop earning. Set against a modest exit value, the maths is brutal. Closing quietly, the option that feels simplest, can be the most expensive decision a commercial firm owner ever makes.

There is a way through it. If you sell to a successor firm that is itself regulated, and it absorbs your liabilities under its own policy, that standalone run-off cost can largely disappear. The same six years of risk gets carried inside a live business instead of landing on you personally. The difference between an exit you control and a bill you did not see coming.

And the market is moving. Active buyers right now. Private equity backed consolidators. Listed acquirers. Panel operators. Capital and appetite to absorb practices on their terms, not yours. The buyers know the demographic but the question is whether the sellers do.

Here is the honest gap underneath all of it. Nobody has actually measured how many small surveying firms have no succession plan. The commentary says well over half. There is no published figure, no proper dataset, no body that has put a number on it. A profession with an ageing ownership base and no map of its own exit. That is not a small thing to leave unexamined.

I am not writing this to frighten anyone. I am writing it because the people who built this profession deserve to leave it on their own terms, with the value they actually have, knowing which kind of firm they really own.

This is the work I am building Succession UK to support. A confidential place to understand what your practice is genuinely worth, where the value really sits, what your options are, and how to exit well rather than expensively.

The waitlist is open now. If you own a firm, or you are advising someone who does, join the waitlist here.

And whether you join or not, do one thing this year. Find out what your firm is worth, and find out whether that value walks out of the door when you do.

Until next time, Nina