Victoria Hicks sold her chartered financial planning firm in 2018. Within weeks of completion, she knew it had been a mistake. The culture she'd built was gone, the future she'd been promised wasn't materialising, and she was bound by a share purchase agreement with nowhere to go. That experience became the foundation for everything she's built since.
Today, Victoria is Founder and CEO of Melo, a business lifecycle consultancy that has been involved in over 100 transactions and works with financial planning firms across the full journey: growth, succession, and exit. In this episode, Abraham sits down with Victoria to explore what most advisers get wrong before, during and after a sale, and what it actually takes to build a firm worth buying.
The Exit That Started Everything
Victoria's firm was growing fast. At 550 million AUM with 22 advisers, it was at the point where a decision had to be made: invest heavily to scale, or join an acquirer with the infrastructure already in place. They chose the latter. Within four weeks of completion, Victoria knew it was wrong.
"I watched the soul get ripped out of the business. We were young, we were dynamic, we were growing. We really thought we were going to have influence."
Locked in by a share purchase agreement and unable to return to financial planning, she spent that time researching why so many sales go wrong. The answer she kept coming back to: the broker model. Sellers weren't understanding what they were signing up for, and nobody was truly on their side. In April 2019, she set up as a sell-side broker. She hasn't looked back.
Owner Mindset: The Real Barrier to Growth
When Victoria's team goes into a firm, the first conversation is rarely about operations. It's about mindset. Most adviser-owners still see themselves as financial advisers first and business owners second, and that identity makes it very hard to step back from clients and step into running a company.
Victoria maps out the inflection points where firms tend to stall: around 300,000 in revenue, then again between 600,000 and 750,000. At each of these points, something fundamental has to change. More people, better tech, real financial reporting, and a willingness to let go of the reins. Many owners bring in an operations manager but then don't let them manage anything.
"You can't get from 300,000 to 1 million doing what you're doing. Because if you were doing that, you'd be at a million."
The firms that break through are the ones where the owner has made a conscious decision: I am now a business leader, not just an adviser. Not everyone wants to make that shift, and Victoria is clear that's a legitimate choice. But you have to choose deliberately, not drift.
What Buyers Actually Look For
After 100-plus transactions, Victoria distils what acquirers want down to two things: opportunity and risk. They want a growing asset with strong governance, clean financials, and a client base that isn't entirely dependent on the owner walking through the door. A business that can demonstrate it is appreciating, not depreciating.
The buyer landscape has also shifted significantly. The wild valuations of 2018 to 2020, when private equity flooded the market and consolidators were buying anything they could, have started to settle. Victoria now sees more appetite for minority stakes, privately owned acquirers, and creative structures that give sellers optionality rather than a clean break.
The Case for Internal Exits
Victoria is a strong advocate for internal exits, whether via management buyout or employee ownership trust, but says most firms come to her too late to make them work. A genuine internal succession requires years of preparation: recruiting and developing the right people, putting incentivisation in place, building a leadership team that understands they are taking on risk as well as reward.
"If you know where you're going, you're much more likely to get there. And that's true whether you want to sell or not."
Her own goal is to sell Melo internally to her team. She describes the work involved, from growth shares and EMI schemes to leadership development, and makes the case that this kind of long-term thinking is exactly what most financial planning firms fail to do for themselves, even as they advise clients to do it every day.
Project Exit: Changing the M&A Market
Melo recently launched Project Exit, an independent online marketplace designed to give sellers access to a much wider range of buyers than the traditional broker model allows. Sellers can build an anonymised profile, get a free valuation, and be matched with vetted buyers based on their preferences, all without being pushed into a process before they are ready.
The platform currently has around 80 registered buyers, from small regional firms through to private equity-backed consolidators. The goal is to shift power back toward sellers and open up the market for privately owned firms that have historically been underserved by the existing broker model.
