INTERVIEW
Buying and selling a business - change alongside continuity After 19 years at the helm of AKA Case Management, Angela Kerr decided to sell her business to two of her team in an MBO. Here, Angela, alongside new directors Dawn Abernethy and Andrew Rose, share their story of completing the deal and why succession planning is key for a business owner “I’ll be honest, when I set up I naively thought I’ll be a lone worker, working at home - I never imagined I’d need a succession plan.” Like so many others who set up in business, Angela Kerr did not foresee the growth of her venture, AKA Case Management, when she set up in 2002. Having become one of the UK’s best-known case management companies, and with Angela increasingly in demand within the profession after being appointed chair of BABICM in 2016, she knew she needed to address the issue of the long-term future of her thriving business. And the solution lay in the form of Dawn Abernethy, a longstanding member of the AKA team, alongside Andrew Rose, who at that time was a new appointment to the business. With Andrew, a BABICM director keen to progress to a senior management role in case management, and Dawn knowing the culture and ethos of the business inside out, the combination of their respective operational and financial expertise came together in March this year to complete the MBO of AKA Case Management - five years after Angela first started to formulate such plans. For the 12 months leading up to the MBO, Dawn and Andrew had been leading the business in preparation for formally taking over, to allow Angela to concentrate on developing the Institute of Registered Case Managers (IRCM), of which she is chair, while giving them the space to develop their confidence as directors and being in the background for support if needed. Under their leadership, and despite the many challenges
NRTIMES
of the pandemic, the business has grown in the past year, continuing to add new people to the team as AKA heads into a new era. “I’ve always looked to bring in the right people to the business to support what we’re delivering and have tried to equip them to do the job well - but it was about looking for the rising stars who relished a challenge, and that is something I had to start looking at seriously when I took over as chair of BABICM,” says Angela, who is remaining with AKA as a consultant. “I had been approached some time previously about whether I wanted to sell to a national business, but that wasn’t for me, it didn’t feel right. We have built an ethos here, we have certain values, we’re like a family. An MBO seemed the right option, but it was working out how that would happen. “It was great to have Dawn and Andrew - Andrew was very clear in what he wanted to achieve, and Dawn had long been a mainstay of the business. We very thoroughly, over the course of five years, really planned out all the risks and challenges and how to mitigate that.” For Andrew, previously operations manager at AKA, he was keen to progress to the next level in his career, and believed AKA was the right place for him to do that. “Whilst working in Australia, I reflected that I had hit a bit of a glass ceiling in case management in terms of what I could do to influence things,” says Andrew, whose background is in psychology, including eight years as a university lecturer. “I knew I wanted to be in a position where I could
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