About Deal Advisory
Specialist pre-sale preparation, led by the solicitor who closes the deal.
Helping owner-managed UK businesses prepare for sale 2-5 years in advance - increasing valuation, reducing deal risk, and avoiding last-minute problems.
Built for Owner-managed UK businesses with £1m-£20m turnover who want to exit in 2-5 years before you plan to sell - and who want to arrive at a buyer's due diligence ready, rather than reactive.
Why prepare years in advance
Without your house in order, a buyer will use your weak points against you.
Every experienced acquirer follows the same playbook. If they find something you have not already dealt with, they will use it in one of three ways:
Chip the price
The issue becomes a reason to discount. Even small gaps - an untidy cap table, a contract that never got signed, a key customer without a written agreement - can cost six figures of enterprise value when a buyer works them into a revised offer letter.
Change the deal terms
More cash gets held back in escrow. Earn-outs stretch longer. Warranty caps rise. Indemnities widen. Each change looks small in isolation; together they shift real risk and real money back on to you.
Put liability on you personally
Personal warranties, uncapped tax indemnities, restrictive covenants that extend for years, retention from proceeds. The sale ‘completes’ but the risk follows you out the door - sometimes for longer than the earn-out.
The fix is not a better broker or a tougher negotiator at the eleventh hour. By then the buyer has leverage and you do not. The fix is to close the gaps before anyone is looking - which is exactly what the two to five year window is for.
Why a solicitor, not an accountant or a broker
Accountants prepare the numbers. Corporate-finance boutiques market the business and negotiate the headline price. Brokers find the buyer. They are all necessary; none of them typically stress-test what will actually get called out in legal due diligence, and almost none review the contracts, warranties and personal exposures with the buyer's eye.
Deal Advisory sits upstream of all of them. It is led by a commercial solicitor who has worked on hundreds of SME deals under £20m - which means the preparation is pointed at the things that actually move the buyer's price and risk position, not the things that look tidy on a teaser document.
The blunt version: on completion, brokers earn three percent or more of enterprise value for delivering the deal; the lawyer earns a fraction of that despite doing the work that stops the price being chipped. Deal Advisory moves that value-protecting work upstream of the broker, so owners complete better transactions and keep more of the proceeds.
Steven Mather
A commercial solicitor, not a consultant.
Steven is a commercial solicitor based in Leicestershire, serving small and medium-sized businesses throughout the UK. He works through Nexa Law, a next-generation law firm with national presence, and has spent his career advising owner-managed businesses on the transactions that define them.
He has advised thousands of clients on deals worth hundreds of millions of pounds. His practice focuses on M&A under £20m - share and asset purchases - alongside commercial contracts, company law and corporate restructuring, employment law for employers, intellectual property, and sector-specific work for healthcare businesses (GPs, dentists, pharmacists).
Clients describe the approach as commercially minded, direct, and allergic to legal jargon. Fixed fees where possible. Rapid turnaround. Steven was named among the UK's top-ranked lawyers on LinkedIn in Q1 2026, and holds a 5.0-star rating based on 132 client reviews.
Call Steven
0116 3667 900Email Steven
steven@stevenmather.co.ukRegulatory disclosure
Deal Advisory services are delivered by Steven Mather through Nexa Law Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA number 633024). Professional indemnity insurance is held at SRA minimum terms and conditions level through the practice. Referral fees to specialist third parties (where applicable) are disclosed in writing under the SRA Code of Conduct paragraph 5.1 and the SRA Transparency Rules. The Exit Readiness Scorecard is a general diagnostic tool and does not constitute legal, financial or tax advice; no solicitor-client relationship is created by using it.