Nigel built his digital agency over two decades before discovering acquisition; his first deal was done in four days and his second came while he was on holiday.

GUEST

Nigel Wilkinson — Founder of WNW Digital; has made three acquisitions in the digital marketing sector.

EPISODE SUMMARY

Nigel founded his digital marketing agency 21 years ago, noting he'd written in his diary back in 2009 that he wanted to get into mergers and acquisitions — but it remained a distant aspiration until he found Jonathan Jay's content in 2019. His first acquisition was entirely unplanned: a friend mentioned a local agency had just gone into liquidation on a Friday lunchtime, and by the following Tuesday Nigel had taken control of the servers. His second came on the Thursday of a holiday he'd barely started.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

▸ Acquisition opportunities don't always arrive on your timetable — when one appears, the ability to move fast is a genuine competitive advantage.

▸ Buying a liquidated business with no team, no office and a database of clients is high-effort but high-learning: it tests your integration and client retention systems under pressure.

▸ The TUPE 30-day consultation window is a legal requirement — but practically, Nigel compresses it to days, since you can't confidently tell staff a deal is happening until it is.

▸ Letting people go after an acquisition — even kind, blameless people — is one of the harder realities of building a group; it should never be approached lightly.

▸ Growing and combining teams requires active management effort: it doesn't happen passively, and entrepreneurs who thrive on 'new and shiny' must invest in the management discipline.

▸ Your own redundancy can be the inflection point that creates the business you eventually build — Nigel traces his entire career back to a single redundancy.

DEAL HIGHLIGHT

First acquisition: a liquidated digital agency. Heard about it Friday at 12:10pm. Contacted the liquidator Monday. Received the invoice Monday evening. Paid Tuesday morning. Took control of client servers Tuesday lunchtime. Four days, start to finish.

"Some bits are really hot, some bits are really freezing — if your head's in the oven and your feet are in the freezer, on average, you're okay."

Learn more: www.dealmakers.co.uk