A lender's survey is an odd place to find a useful signal about how professional-services firms get bought and sold, but this one is worth sitting with. Shawbrook's M Agenda research, published in early October 2026 and picked up by This Is Money on 5 October, asked leaders of mid-sized UK businesses a simple question: do you want to keep being called an SME? Six in ten said no. The reasons they gave have very little to do with branding and a great deal to do with how buyers, lenders and the market size up a firm before they put a number on it.
The numbers are specific, which is unusual for a debate about labels. Shawbrook found that 61% of mid-sized business leaders surveyed would rather their company was not described as an SME. Seven in ten, 71%, said their firm is regularly assumed to be smaller than it actually is purely because of how the term "SME" gets used in the media and in policy. Nearly three-quarters, 73%, agreed that the label lumps their business in with companies they have very little in common with. And the practical cost of all this is not abstract: 71% said they find it difficult to locate finance products genuinely designed for their size, up from 65% when the same question was asked in autumn 2025.
Shawbrook's research split "mid-sized" into three turnover bands rather than treating it as one blob: roughly £5m to £9.9m, £10m to £49.9m, and £50m to £100m. Every one of those bands sits inside, or above, the official UK definition of an SME, which caps out at fewer than 250 employees and turnover of roughly £44m. More than half the respondents, 56%, said standard small-business finance products simply do not fit a firm their size, and that figure rose to 63% among the £50m-£100m band specifically — the group furthest from what most people picture when they hear the word "small".
Our instinct is to treat naming disputes as noise. This one is not, because it describes a real gap between how a firm's owner thinks of their business and how a buyer, lender or acquirer is actually sizing it up. An owner who has spent twenty years calling their practice "just a small firm" tends to negotiate like one — accepting the first number, assuming limited buyer interest, treating a single offer as the market. A buyer who recognises the firm as a genuine mid-market asset, with institutional-grade systems and a fee base well beyond lifestyle-practice territory, is not thinking in those terms at all. The gap between those two mental models is where value quietly leaks out of a deal, long before heads of terms are even drafted.
This matters specifically in accountancy, law and financial advice, because the sector is full of firms that sit squarely inside Shawbrook's disputed bands on revenue — multi-partner practices with £3m, £6m or £12m of fee income — while their founders still describe themselves, out loud, as a small business. Our own piece on who's buying UK accountancy practices maps the scale of the institutional money now active in this market: Grant Thornton, Evelyn Partners, Azets and Xeinadin are not shopping for sole traders. They are built to acquire exactly the firms this survey describes.
There is a reason acquirers increasingly concentrate on this bracket rather than running classic micro-SME roll-up strategies that buy dozens of sub-£1m practices and bolt them together. A firm already turning over £2m to £10m-plus has usually solved the problems a buyer would otherwise have to solve after completion: a finance function that reports on time, fee-earners beyond the founder who can run client relationships without him or her in the room, and systems that do not fall over the week the previous owner stops answering the phone. Our note on buy-and-build economics sets out the arithmetic of multiple arbitrage in detail; the point that matters here is simpler — integration risk falls sharply once a target firm has already crossed that scale threshold, and lower integration risk is one of the few things that reliably supports a higher multiple for the seller.
None of this means micro-practice sales have stopped happening. They haven't, and plenty of sole-partner practices still sell every year, usually to a local trade buyer rather than an institutional one. What has changed is where the competitive tension in a sale process now concentrates. A firm that can credibly present itself as a mid-sized, professionally run business — rather than apologising for being "just an SME" — is the firm several buyer types are chasing at once, and competitive tension between buyers is what actually moves a price, not the adjectives in the information memorandum.
Take two accountancy practices approaching a sale in the same month. Firm A turns over £1.8m, has one partner doing most client-facing work, and no finance team beyond a part-time bookkeeper. Firm B turns over £6.5m — squarely inside Shawbrook's disputed £5m-£9.9m "mid-sized" band — with four partners, a controller running monthly management accounts, and recurring fee income across more than 200 clients.
Firm A will likely attract a handful of local trade buyers and sell on a standard GRF multiple at the lower end of the typical 0.8–1.6x range described in our guide to how accountancy practices are valued, because the buyer pool is thin and every one of them is pricing in the risk of losing clients the moment the founder leaves. Firm B, by contrast, is the kind of asset that draws interest from consolidators, private-equity-backed platforms and trade buyers simultaneously — not because it is twice the size, but because its scale and infrastructure make it a materially lower-risk integration. That competitive tension between buyer types, not the raw revenue difference, is what typically pushes Firm B toward the top of the range rather than the middle. The lesson is not "get bigger before you sell" — most owners cannot manufacture £4m of extra turnover on demand — it is "know which bracket you are actually in, and negotiate like it."
The naming debate itself will not move a valuation by a single pound. What it points at — the gap between how mid-sized firm owners describe themselves and how sophisticated buyers actually see them — is a genuinely useful thing to check before you let either version drive a decision about selling.
Shawbrook's M Agenda research, published in early October 2026 and covered by This Is Money on 5 October 2026, surveyed leaders of mid-sized UK businesses directly. It found that 61% would rather their company was not described as an SME, that 71% said their firm is regularly assumed to be smaller than it actually is because of how the term is used, and that 73% agreed the SME label lumps their business in with companies they have very little in common with. The research also found that difficulty finding finance tailored to their size had risen from 65% in autumn 2025 to 71% a year later.
Shawbrook's research split mid-sized businesses into bands rather than one figure: roughly £5m to £9.9m turnover, £10m to £49.9m, and £50m to £100m. All three bands sit inside, or above, the official UK and EU definition of an SME, which caps out at under 250 employees and turnover of roughly £44m. That overlap is exactly the complaint — a business turning over £40m and a sole trader turning over £200,000 can both be legally classed as the same thing, which is why over half the respondents in the £50m-£100m band said small-business finance products simply do not fit them.
Indirectly, yes. Most UK accountancy, legal and IFA practices that go through a genuine sale process sit well inside the disputed mid-market band on turnover, even though owners often still think of themselves in small-business terms. That mismatch between self-image and actual scale shapes negotiating behaviour: sellers who undersell their own position accept weaker terms than the buyer pool competing for their firm would actually support. It does not change valuation mechanics directly, but it changes how confidently a seller walks into the room.
A firm with £5m-£10m of revenue typically already has a finance function, multiple fee-earners beyond the founder, and systems that do not collapse the moment the owner steps back — the exact things a buyer otherwise has to build after completion on a micro-SME roll-up. That lowers integration risk and supports a higher multiple for the seller, while still being small enough to buy outright rather than needing a public-market-sized cheque. It is a genuine shift in where acquirers spend their time, not a rejection of smaller deals altogether.
Sources: the 61%, 71%, 73% and turnover-band figures are from Shawbrook's M Agenda research, published in early October 2026 and reported by This Is Money on 5 October 2026 and by The Intermediary. The official UK definition of an SME (fewer than 250 employees, turnover up to roughly £44m) is the long-standing UK and EU statutory threshold. GRF multiple ranges referenced here follow our own guide to how accountancy practices are valued.
This article is general market commentary on business classification and professional-services M&A, not investment, legal or financial advice. Founder Capital LLP is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Nothing here is an offer or invitation to invest; any investment opportunities we reference are available only to professional investors, certified high-net-worth individuals and self-certified sophisticated investors, are not open to retail investors, and capital is at risk and returns are not guaranteed. Take independent advice before making decisions about selling, valuing or acquiring a business on the strength of anything written here.
