Julie Waddell signed the Moorish exit deal on her 50th birthday. At around ten o'clock at night, with a neighbour called round to witness signatures, lawyers on the phone having gone backwards and forwards all day, her family waiting for the birthday dinner that had been pushed back and pushed back.
She had told the lawyers that morning: it is today. She did not care what they had to do. If it slipped to Monday, it could become Tuesday, and Tuesday was when the acquirer's AGM deadline expired. They had said clearly that if the deal could not be announced at the AGM, the deal was off. Julie took them at their word.
It got done.
That moment, the pressure of it, the timing, the refusal to let it slip, is a good way into what exit actually requires. It is not a reward that arrives at the end of a long journey. It is the hardest part of the journey.
Building for exit from early on
One of the things that distinguishes Moorish's trajectory from many similar businesses is that Julie was thinking about exit from relatively early on. Her IP protection decisions, made when she had very little money and spent proportionally more on legal advice than almost anything else, were made specifically because she knew that the value at exit would sit in the intellectual property, not in bricks and mortar or headcount.
She did not have a factory. She did not have a large team. She had recipes, branding, supplier relationships and retail relationships that were owned by Moorish and could be transferred. That is what she was building, consistently, throughout the 12 years.
"I didn't have a factory or a head office full of people. The value at exit was going to be in the IP. So I spent the most, when I had the least, on making sure I owned it properly."
Keith, the chairman who came in for the final two and a half years, was brought in specifically to build towards exit. He had done it before, multiple times, at scale. He knew what a business needed to look like to be credible to an acquirer. He knew what due diligence would surface. He knew which corporate finance house was the right fit for a deal of Moorish's size and sector. That specific, practical knowledge was the value he provided, not generic strategic guidance.
The Waitrose delisting: crisis as catalyst
The event that most clearly accelerated the exit timeline was not a positive milestone. It was a catastrophe.
After eight or nine years in Waitrose, during which Moorish had grown to a significant wall of product across 150 stores with strong rate of sale, the buyer announced a new own-label-only strategy. The listing was withdrawn. Eighty per cent of Moorish's turnover, overnight.
Julie went home from that meeting to her family Christmas party. She describes her response to what had happened with characteristic practicality: never mind, carry on, what is next?
Andy, her MD, was always surprised by how she handled those moments. She could not afford to be derailed. The mortgage was on the business. The team's livelihoods were on the business. Derailment was not an available option.
What the delisting did, beyond the immediate financial pressure, was clarify things. Moorish had Sainsbury's revenue. They had recently got into Asda. There was some export business. There were enough building blocks to make a credible case to an acquirer. There was also enough opportunity still ahead, Tesco unlisted, Morrisons unlisted, that the business had clear growth headroom.
Julie decided she wanted to sell. She had been running hard for nearly a decade. She had the right team around her for the first time. The conditions, however pressured, were as good as they were going to get.
"We could have taken investment and brought in a team and worked from an office. By this point in the game, I was not interested in that. I just wanted to be done."
The two weeks that nearly broke everything
The acquirer came through Keith's network. They were a business looking to add branded product to a portfolio that had become stagnant, and Moorish fitted what they needed. The timeline they proposed was brutal: two weeks to complete due diligence, in order to announce the acquisition at their AGM.
Keith was, by this point, functioning as the person who knew what the corporate finance world looked like from the inside. He recommended the corporate finance house. He recommended the lawyer, having received one quote that was three times what they eventually paid and declined it. He was on the phone throughout the two-week process, navigating the due diligence, keeping things moving, being the calm presence when the pressure was at its highest.
That combination, the right corporate finance house for the deal size, the right legal team, a chairman who had lived through this process before, was not assembled in two weeks. It had been assembled over two and a half years, specifically in anticipation of this moment.
What the other side looks like
Julie screenshotted the bank app when the money arrived.
She describes the immediate aftermath with her characteristic mix of practicality and self-awareness. She could not buy Moorish products for six months after the deal. She did not want to know if the quality had dropped. The brand was her legacy, and she cared about it too much to look until she was ready.
Six months later, at a Christmas party, she bought a pot. It was delicious. She was relieved.
The business has since launched a hot honey variant, smoked hummus base with a sachet of hot honey to drizzle over the top. She bought it. She approves. The acquirer, now a subsidiary of Baxters, is doing well with it.
As for Julie: she consults, selectively. She thinks about going again sometimes. Her son encourages her to. She is not sure. There is still, by her own description, a burning drive within her that is currently unchannelled. She suspects it will find somewhere to go.
"I walked away very happy. And I don't need to do it again. But maybe."
What exit readiness actually looks like
The Moorish story ends well, but the ending was not inevitable. Several things had to be true simultaneously for the exit to be achievable, and they were all the result of deliberate decisions made years earlier.
The IP was protected, from the very beginning, at disproportionate cost. The cap table was clean, three people with aligned interests and no complex investor structure to navigate. The chairman had the specific experience of exits at scale, not just general business experience. The corporate finance and legal advice was well-chosen and right-sized for the deal. And the founder knew what she wanted: a clean exit, on her terms, at a price that was life-changing for everyone who had earned it.
For any senior leader considering a move into a founder business, these are the conditions worth assessing. Not in the abstract, but specifically. Has this founder thought about exit in the same level of detail that Julie had? Is the IP protected? Is the cap table structured in a way that makes a clean exit achievable? Is there a pathway to finding the right advisers when the moment comes?
At bpe search, we work with founders and leadership teams at exactly the stages where these decisions are being made. The right senior hire at the right moment can make the difference between a business that reaches its potential and one that falls short not for want of product or market, but for want of the right people around the founder when it matters most.
That is what this series has been about. Not the headline of the exit, but everything that had to happen first.
This is the final post in a series from bpe search drawing on a recent event featuring Julie Waddell, founder of Moorish Foods. The full white paper, covering all themes in depth, is available to download here.
