Rainmakers wrapped - the best of 2025
A dozen highlights from a year of lively reporting on regional M&A
Hello Rainmakers,
We’ve enjoyed bringing you Rainmakers for a second year, right across the team we’ve produced a steady stream of lively stories that seem to have struck a chord throughout the M&A community.
Here are the cream of the crop.
It’s been another tough year for getting deals done, but covering this market is never dull.
Rainmakers is a reader-supported publication. Subscribers get two unique pieces a week and full access to our back catalogue of investigations, scoops, and insights. These include updates from columnist The Secret Investor and interviews with entrepreneurs (like this one), as well as leaders from VC and PE investors like Mercia and LDC. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber, or sign up for a free trial…
From ‘Pies to the prize - how Alan Hardy survived and sold his successful golf club
Love him or loathe him, Alan Hardy is a survivor. The uber-controversial one-time owner of Notts County (and more on that later) last week brought down the curtain on a turbulent - yet somehow successful - era by selling that most rare of businesses: a successful golf and country club.
Hardy has sold the impressive Nottinghamshire Golf and Country Club - a true oasis just outside the former mining village of Cotgrave - to The Club Company. Duncan & Toplis and Roythornes Solicitors advised him on the deal.
The buyer, The Club Company owns 18 country clubs - the majority located in central and southern England. The facilities at the Nottinghamshire pretty closely match the profile of the other clubs in the portfolio: golf courses, modern health and fitness facilities, swimming pool, tennis courts, bars, restaurants and a very nice hotel.
Inevitably, some of them now also have padel courts.
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Rachel Reeves cosies up to private equity
Speaking at the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association’s (BVCA) annual Summit, attended by over 1000 delegates from the private capital industry, Chancellor Rachel Reeves reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to economic growth and the importance of the role played by the private capital industry in achieving that goal.
Whilst in conversation with the BVCA’s Chief Executive Michael Moore, Rachel Reeves stated that: “Government alone is not going to get economic growth. You can only get growth if you’ve got investment, productivity improvements and people are choosing to take on workers. And that’s where your industry, private equity and venture capital comes in, because some of the fastest growing businesses are PE backed, VC backed businesses, I want to do what I can as Chancellor.”
After the Budget we reported our hot take on the Budget, joining all the other hot takes from everyone else with a LinkedIn account and a fondness for punishing people on benefits, as well as the exemplary on the day coverage from the team at TheBusinessDesk.com.
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The Secret Investor discussed one of his favourite topics / rants. The London vs Regional deals market.
There’s a lot of “cause vs effect” at play here, akin to the men’s v women’s football industry debate. ie. how do you know if it’s any good if it’s never been invested in or nurtured? It’s not enough to sit there and say “xyz region is 10% the size of London, it’s not worth bothering with”.London, for all this additional fee income, has real issues when it comes to dress codes and has well and truly proven the point that if you give finance people free reign on what to wear, they’ll cock it up!
Whether it’s the older money City grandees who live out in the sticks in Kent or near Ascot, with their funny coloured chinos and strange slip on shoes like they’ve just woken up on their ranch, or the banker bro penchant for gilets and quarter zips, they just don’t seem at ease.
BBC and HBO’s racy TV series Industry provides all the evidence you need.
In fairness, the confusion is probably not helped by their reluctance to turn up for work on Mondays and Fridays having relocated to the south coast during Covid… but the number of “Tuesdays, Wednesdays And Thursdays” on show in London has never been more noticeable.
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Things fall apart for last relics of Inc & Co empire
When business empires are built on fraud and lies, they are always likely to end in as messy a way as you’d imagine.
And so it is with Manchester-based so-called self-styled private equity disruptors Inc & Co, and their associated investment business Fresh Thinking Group.
On Thursday last week their remaining retail business King Street Grooming was evicted from premises on Manchester’s King Street, where it operated a salon.
The travel agency Baldwins has been stripped of its ABTA membership, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
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As David Bowie (nearly) said: Let me introduce you to the (martech) gang*
Delve into the smoke and mirrors world of marketing and you could be forgiven for coming out of the other side confused, at very best.
Paid media, earned media and owned media - this is an industry that has built up what often seems like an impenetrable wall of jargon around it aimed at business owners who think they simply must have some kind of marketing and/or PR expertise on hand.
So, it's sometimes easy to forget that at the top of these marketing firms sit some truly dynamic people. And, like any other industry, they want to grow their businesses. How do they do that quickly, and with the minimum of fuss? By dipping their toes into the world of M&A, of course.
According to business advisory firm Moore Kingston Smith, M&A activity in the UK marketing sector saw a slight rebound in 2024 after a slowdown in late 2023, with a growing interest in technology-led agencies, particularly those focused on martech (marketing technology). While the overall market is still recovering from the economic uncertainties of the previous year; private equity involvement remains present but at a slightly lower level than historical trends.
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Why Paul’s the Mann - the winner of the Yorkshire Rainmaker of the Year 2025 speaks to Sheryl Moore
“They’ve been trying to get rid of me for years!” jokes Paul Mann after revealing he’s been ‘man and boy’ at law firm Squire Patton Boggs.
The chatty and affable Mann was recently named Rainmaker of the Year, an accolade he was ‘humbled’ to receive.
“It was humbling,” says Mann. “Because it was voted for by the market. I was absolutely delighted, and it was a nice surprise.”
While Mann may have been shocked, for others it was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, when I asked a fellow rainmaker who he tipped to win the coveted accolade he said: “Well the name I hear most around town is Paul Mann, so he’s my odds-on favourite.”
In fact, Mann has been ‘around town’ for more than two decades and is a stalwart of the Yorkshire rainmaker community. Armed with clients he’s had for decades and, as head of PE for the UK and Europe, Mann has made his mark in the corporate finance community.
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Cavendish Midlands team eyes tech deals
Ellie Hollinshed met up with Darren Boocock and Dan Marchington who are anchoring Cavendish’s arrival in the Midlands.
Investment bank Cavendish has officially planted its flag in the Midlands at shared workspace Gillbanks, and the senior duo steering the ship definitely didn’t just stumble in off the street.
Darren Boocock is anchoring Cavendish’s arrival in the Midlands. With 25 years in corporate finance, including time at Deloitte in Leeds, a stint in investment banking and nearly 20 years shaping deals in Birmingham, he’s no stranger to the region’s business landscape.
His move to launch the Birmingham office aligned with another former Deloitte colleague setting up in Manchester, Oliver Tebbutt.
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Common sense, backing the right people and why the guys with dollar signs in their eyes don’t make money
Endless founder Garry Wilson opened up to Sheryl Moore on the best of times, and the why the worst day of his life turned out to be a blessing.
More than £1.5bn raised, 100 investments and 40,000 jobs safeguarded, not a bad achievement for one of eight kids raised on a Belfast council estate during the troubles.
Garry Wilson has put Yorkshire on the map for mid-market private equity, and his passion for the regions is perhaps unrivalled. It is this dedication that saw him recently crowned Yorkshire Ambassador of the Year, an award he says was an ‘honour’ to receive.
“I may not be from Yorkshire, but I do feel Yorkshire. I’ve beaten the drum all my life, whether that be for Yorkshire, the North or the regions. You know, I’ve always been the guy on the outside that’s been doing things away from London. And I’ll continue to do so.”
By anyone’s standards Endless has been a phenomenal success story. Private equity is a tough business and the stakes are high and, for Wilson, there’s certainly been some ups and downs along the way.
So, what is the secret of its success, as it’s quite clearly more than just the luck of the Irish.
Wilson says: “You know what? One of my American investors asked me that once. He said Garry ‘what is it? What’s the secret? And I said CS, and he was like ‘what’s that’ and I said, ‘common sense’, that’s it.
“It’s about getting into the nitty gritty, line by line. Working out how the business is generating its revenue? What’s it spending its money on? And then the management. I always say to the team here if we get the management right our job as investors is easy. But if you can’t find the right people the investment doesn’t work.”
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Dan Booth: how Leonard Curtis can double in size again after Pollen Street deal
We shared the inside track on the investment at Leonard Curtis, the Manchester-based restructuring specialist and advisory business, which has sold a majority stake to Pollen Street Capital, the ambitious private equity investor, in a deal that values the firm at over £80m.
Nick Cowles dramatically quits Zeus
By any measure Nick Cowles has had a fascinating career, albeit with the same company for 22 years.
He started as a grad trainee at Zeus Capital in Ralli Court in Manchester, long since demolished, and last week it was revealed that he’d resigned from his position as CEO.
He led the acquisition last year of the WH Ireland Capital Markets business which gave Zeus an enlarged platform with 125+ corporate clients and a national footprint across London, Manchester, Leeds and Bristol.
He’s being replaced by two people. John Cummins and Tremayne Ducker are now Co-CEOs of Zeus, with Ducker also Head of Investment Banking, and Cummins, who joined Zeus on the acquisition of the WH Ireland business, and was appointed to the board in July 2025, as COO.
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“[It] is a buggar of a contract so I would rather not draw attention to it unless we have to”
When private equity backed Node4 made moves to buy tech business Tisski for £45m they did so with the best of intentions. What happened next is shocking. A warning. A lesson.
But if the main learning from today’s remarkable tale about a good deal gone bad then it’s this - be careful what you write down.
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Rob Buckland on the graceful growing of Peter Gradwell
Nostalgia for the Nineties is all the rage, we hear at Rainmakers. A certain band has reformed and are now touring, triggering memories of simpler times when we used phones to actually phone people and we were thrilled by the seemingly endless possibilities of the World Wide Web.
As I said in the headline. Some might say the future’s not what it used to be . . . but this is why they’d be wrong.
Bright young people started forming businesses to exploit the capabilities of the internet, among them a quietly spoken software engineering student at Aberystwyth University. Moving to the University of Bath to study for a PhD in Computer Science, Peter Gradwell started promoting his fledgling business in what was then the almost unknown area of VoIP (voice over internet protocol).
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