I offer out legal and financial advice to a range of SME companies, these are typically management buy outs but sometimes they come directly out of my network of contacts with private equity firms.  Often I get a call to say they have an interesting business which they wish to invest into but it is not yet strong enough finance department wise and am I interested in helping the strength, so they can proceed with a transaction.

This sort of call comes a lot and it reflects that the priority of businesses has not been to the finance functions.

Teer Coatings Ltd is a great business which is a specialist niche engineering business based in Droitwich in the West Midlands.  They spun out from an Austrian parent company called Miba using funds raised from Thin Cats capital.