48 Hours to Decide

Tales, No. 1. A made-up story with real-world numbers: Helen, Marsh & Co and Harbour Home don't exist.

The email landed at 4:52 on a Tuesday, eight minutes before Helen Marsh was due to cash up.

She read it standing behind the till at Marsh & Co, the homeware and gift shop she had run on Sevenoaks High Street for eleven years. Candles, linen, cards, the kind of ceramics people buy for someone else and then keep for themselves.

It came from the acquisitions director at Harbour Home, a national chain with 140 stores and a habit of turning up in towns like hers. The offer was laid out plainly: £185,000 for the business, goodwill and fixtures, plus the stock at cost, which she reckoned at about £40,000. Completion in eight weeks.

The last line was in bold. This offer is open until 5pm on Thursday.

Forty-eight hours.

The numbers she knew by heart

Marsh & Co turned over £410,000 last year. Gross margin was 48%, which left about £197,000 to pay for everything else. Rent was £38,000. Dani, her manager, and two part-timers cost £71,000 with employer's National Insurance and pensions. Rates, utilities, card fees, insurance, the website and the accountant took another £36,000.

What was left, about £52,000, was Helen's income. Not a fortune, but hers. It had paid for her daughter's degree and most of a kitchen.

On paper, £185,000 was about three and a half years of profit. It felt fair. Not generous, and she suspected Harbour Home knew she could tell the difference.

Why the timing hurt

Two other things had happened that month, and Helen had a feeling Harbour Home knew about at least one of them.

The first was a letter from her landlord's agent. The lease was up for renewal in three months, and the proposed new rent was £49,000. That was £11,000 off her income, a fifth of it, before she sold a single candle.

The second was Dani. On Friday, in the stockroom, Dani had told her, kindly and with obvious guilt, that she'd been offered an area manager job. Dani ran the floor, did the Christmas buying and knew which customers wanted a phone call when the Danish glassware came in. She would be gone in four weeks.

Helen did the sum on the back of a delivery note. The new rent, plus hiring and training Dani's replacement, plus the dip in sales that always followed a new face on the shop floor. Her £52,000 became something nearer £35,000, and that was if Christmas went well.

Three options on a notepad

That evening, at the kitchen table, she wrote them down.

One: accept. £185,000 plus stock, about £225,000 in all. With Business Asset Disposal Relief, her accountant said, the tax on the gain would be 18%. She'd walk away clean: no new lease, no recruiting.

Two: refuse and fight. Negotiate the rent down, promote one of the part-timers, push online sales. Keep the thing she had built, and bet she could protect a shrinking income while a 140-store chain went looking for another unit on the same street.

Three: counter. Ask for more, and find out whether the deadline was real.

She rang her accountant at 8am on Wednesday. He was blunt. "Deadlines like that are a tactic. But the rent rise isn't a tactic, Helen. That's real money."

The decision

At 11am on Wednesday she countered: £215,000, plus a six-month paid consultancy to help with the handover. Harbour Home replied at 3pm on Thursday, two hours inside their own deadline, which told her something on its own. £195,000, no consultancy, stock still at cost.

She signed at 4:40pm.

Eighteen months later

The shop is a Harbour Home now. It's brighter and busier, and it sells candles that look a lot like Helen's, for less.

Helen is fine. Better than fine, by most measures. The mortgage is gone, and she spends two days a week advising independent shops.

But a few months after completion she ran into the landlord's agent at a friend's fiftieth. He mentioned, without meaning anything by it, that £49,000 had only ever been an opening figure. The landlord would have settled at £42,000 for a ten-year lease with a reliable tenant. And Harbour Home, he added, had been talking to the landlord about the unit for the best part of a year, long before anyone emailed her.

She did the sum again on the drive home. At £42,000, even without Dani, she'd have been looking at something like £43,000 a year. Less than before, but still a living, and still hers. Against that, £195,000 and no more Saturdays. She ran it both ways and couldn't make either answer come out clearly ahead.

In December she went into the Harbour Home to buy a present for her sister. Someone had put the Danish glassware in the window, lit from behind, the way Dani used to. Helen stood looking at it for longer than she meant to, then went in and paid full price for a candle.

She still has the delivery note, in the drawer with the completion papers. Her sums are on the back. Above them, in the same pen, is the agent's phone number. She'd copied it off the rent letter that Tuesday evening, before she started on the numbers, meaning to ring him first thing.

What would you have done? Take the money, or keep the shop?

If this one got under your skin, watch The Founder, number one on our business films list: another story about a small operator and a bigger player.