I'm Manoj, and I buy established, privately-owned businesses directly — not as a broker, not on behalf of a fund, not running a process for anyone but myself.
Before this, I spent nineteen years in property and related services — as a landlord, in the financial services sector as a mortgage and protection adviser, and sourcing and developing property investments for private clients. That background isn't incidental to what I do now. It's the reason I do it.
I became a buy-to-let landlord in 2008 — which meant learning property through one of the harder periods to be holding it. I've been hands-on with real estate, in one form or another, ever since.
That's meant a wide range of projects over the years — converting a six-bed HMO into a ten-bed professional HMO in the Midlands, sourcing and developing commercial-to-residential property, and turning a commercial office into twenty-five self-contained studio apartments. Different projects, different scales, but the same underlying discipline each time: understanding what a property or a business is genuinely capable of, not just what it happens to show on paper this year.
That discipline is what I bring to every business I look at now.
I'm not a broker, and I'm not running a fund on behalf of investors I need to answer to. I buy directly, with my own judgement, at my own pace.
That matters for a straightforward reason: I'm not incentivised to rush you, list you publicly, or push a deal that doesn't genuinely work for both sides. I'm looking for the right business, from the right owner, and I'd rather take the time to get that right than move fast and get it wrong — for either of us.
I also believe decisions like this deserve space. If you're not ready to talk about selling yet, that's a legitimate place to start from, not a disqualifying one.
If you own a business and you're starting to think about what's next, I'd rather you heard this directly from me than through a listing.