Draft
Succession does not have to mean walking away
The choice is rarely between running the business forever and leaving it entirely.
3 min read
Investor · Entrepreneur · Strategic Operator
Investing in businesses for the long term.
Henry Parkin explores investment and partnership opportunities with owners of established businesses in Northern Illinois. His focus is strengthening good companies for their next stage, through strategic direction, operating discipline and a thoughtful approach to ownership.
- £65m+
- Aggregate transaction experience, supporting and executing transactions
- ConfirmComply
- Founder of a compliance network for regulated markets
- Glencoe, Illinois
- Based on Chicago's North Shore
What Henry does
Build, acquire, partner.
Investment is the umbrella. These are the ways it takes shape in practice.
Build
Creating and developing businesses in complex and regulated markets, including ConfirmComply, a developing permissioned compliance network.
Acquire
Investing in established, profitable businesses with durable demand, and developing them over a long horizon. Full acquisition is one clear option among several.
Partner
Working with owners and management teams on aligned transitions, staged outcomes and long-term value creation.
Respect the foundations. Build what comes next.
A business that has traded profitably for decades holds something that cannot be recreated quickly: years of commercial judgment, people who chose to stay, customers who kept calling back, and a reputation earned one job at a time.
So change starts with understanding. What looks inefficient from outside is often the accumulated answer to a problem an outsider has not met yet.
Understanding is the starting point, not the destination. The ambition is stronger management, operating visibility, documented standards for the processes that determine quality, and investment in the constraints that have quietly capped growth.
For owners
More than one way forward.
Ownership, economics and involvement are separate decisions. You do not need to be ready to sell to begin a conversation; what is realistic depends on the business and on what an owner actually wants.
01
Full exit
Sell outright and step away after an agreed transition.
02
Retain equity
Take liquidity now and keep a stake, an investment carrying risk as well as potential upside.
03
Continue leading
Stay in an executive or operational role.
04
Contribute differently
A board, chair, advisory or customer-facing role instead of the day-to-day.
About Henry
A commercial and operating background, applied close to home.
Henry Parkin is an investor, entrepreneur and strategic operator based in Glencoe, Illinois. He has experience supporting and executing transactions with an aggregate value exceeding £65 million, and is the founder of ConfirmComply, a developing permissioned compliance network for complex, regulated markets.
His focus now is Northern Illinois: established B2B, technical and essential-service companies whose owners are weighing what comes next. Businesses of this size are developed by being present, with the management team, the workforce and often the customers.
Perspectives
Draft writing on ownership and succession.
Draft
Ownership, economics and involvement are separate decisions
Three questions get collapsed into one, and the range of workable outcomes narrows for no good reason.
3 min read
Draft
What makes a good business ready for its next stage
Readiness goes beyond the numbers. It is about how much of the company lives in one person's head.
3 min read
Start with a straightforward conversation.
Owners, advisers, brokers, lenders and operators are all welcome to make contact. You do not need to have decided anything to begin.