Agchem Project Consulting acquired by Staphyt

Douglas Edmunds advised the shareholders of Agchem Project Consulting (APC), the UK agrochemical and biocides regulatory consultancy, on its sale to Staphyt — the French agroscience contract research and regulatory group.

Deal overview

Douglas Edmunds advised the shareholders of Agchem Project Consulting on the sale of the business to Staphyt, a French-headquartered agroscience group providing field experimentation, laboratory testing, regulatory advice, and registration dossier management across Europe, North Africa, and Brazil.

The transaction completed in May 2018. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Agchem Project Consulting was founded by Steve Shires in 2001. The business built a regulatory consultancy serving companies placing agrochemicals, biocides, and industrial chemicals on regulated markets — advising on risk assessment, dossier preparation, and the national, European, and international registration routes those products must clear before sale.

At completion the business employed 23 people and worked through a global network of associate consultants.

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Deal at a glance

Target	Agchem Project Consulting Limited (APC)
Acquirer	Staphyt, France
Completion date	May 2018
Deal value	Undisclosed
Deal structure	Undisclosed
Sell-side M&A advisor	Douglas Edmunds Now CapEQ
Sector	Agroscience regulatory consultancy — agrochemicals, biocides, and chemicals
Target HQ	United Kingdom
Founded	2001
Founder	Steve Shires
Employees at completion	23, supported by a global network of associate consultants
Customer base	International agrochemical, biocide, and chemical manufacturers requiring regulatory registration and risk assessment
Post-acquisition status	Retained the APC brand, staff, and technical organisation as one of two independent regulatory business units within the Staphyt Group

Staphyt agroscience field experimentation and laboratory testing across European regulatory markets

Strategic acquisition by Staphyt

Staphyt is an agroscience contract research organisation with operations across Europe, North Africa, and Brazil, employing more than 700 professionals at the time of the transaction.

Its service lines covered field experimentation, laboratory testing, regulatory advice, and registration dossier management for crop protection, biocide, and biocontrol products.

APC gave the group depth in the regulatory affairs discipline specifically: chemical risk assessment, dossier authorship, and the substance-level expertise that determines whether a product reaches market.

The combination allowed Staphyt to take a client from field trial through to submitted registration dossier within a single group — a capability its individual competitors in the agroscience services market held only in part.

How the deal came together

The market backdrop

European agroscience services consolidated steadily through the second half of the 2010s. The regulatory burden on crop protection and biocide manufacturers rose sharply under the EU plant protection products regime and the Biocidal Products Regulation, and the cost of assembling a compliant dossier rose with it.

Manufacturers responded by reducing the number of service providers they used and favouring groups that could deliver trials, analysis, and regulatory submission together.

That created a structural advantage for consolidators and a corresponding question for owner-managed specialists: remain a single-discipline consultancy competing for subcontracted work, or become part of a group that controls the whole chain.

APC was a profitable, technically respected business of 23 people with a global associate network — precisely the kind of asset a scaling agroscience group needed and could not build quickly from scratch.

Finding the right acquirer

The buyer universe for a regulatory consultancy of this scale is narrow and specialist.

It does not include generalist financial buyers, who typically struggle with a business whose value sits in a small number of technically qualified people.

It does include agroscience contract research groups building integrated service platforms, larger regulatory consultancies seeking territorial or substance-class coverage, and testing groups moving upstream into advisory work.

The approach concentrated on acquirers for whom APC's regulatory capability filled a defined gap rather than duplicated existing capacity.

Staphyt met that test directly: strong in field and laboratory work, comparatively light in regulatory affairs, and explicit about wanting to serve clients across the full registration pathway.

Running a process that protected value

Value in a consultancy of this type is carried by its people and its client relationships, both of which are vulnerable to a poorly handled process.

Confidentiality was managed tightly, buyer contact was controlled, and Steve Shires and the technical team continued to deliver client programmes throughout — a business visibly distracted by its own sale invites a discount.

The valuation narrative was built on the elements a specialist acquirer underwrites: repeat client relationships with substance registrants, the technical seniority of the consultant base, the associate network's international reach, and the fact that regulatory work recurs as dossiers come up for renewal.

Competitive tension was established before terms were negotiated, so that no single buyer set the price by making the first offer.

Completing on the right terms

The transaction completed in May 2018 on undisclosed terms. The structure protected what made the business worth buying: APC retained its brand, its staff, and its technical organisation.

Staphyt established two independent but complementary business units — APC and Staphyt Regulatory — rather than absorbing the acquired team into an existing structure.

For APC's clients, the consultants and relationships they had contracted for stayed in place.

For APC's employees, the operating unit they worked in continued to exist under its own name.

Enhancing the Staphyt regulatory offer

Following the acquisition the Staphyt Group brought together more than 60 regulatory and scientific specialists covering chemical risk assessment, regulatory offices in eight countries, and a global network of over 70 consultants supporting national, European, and international registrations.

The combined group could take on larger regulatory and study programmes than either business could have accepted alone — the practical commercial outcome of the deal for clients on both sides.

Agchem Project Consulting regulatory consultants working on agrochemical registration dossiers

Douglas Edmunds, Partner at CapEQ, sell-side advisor to Agchem Project Consulting shareholders

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M&A advisory support

The shareholders of Agchem Project Consulting were advised on the sale by Douglas Edmunds, who now practises as a Partner at CapEQ.

APC was a technically excellent business built around a small group of genuinely expert people. The task was to find a buyer who understood that the expertise was the asset — and would leave it intact. Staphyt did exactly that."

Douglas Edmunds, Partner, CapEQ

About Agchem Project Consulting

Founded by Steve Shires in 2001, Agchem Project Consulting provided regulatory consultancy to companies placing agrochemicals, biocides, and chemicals on regulated markets.

The business advised on chemical risk assessment, registration dossier preparation, and the national, European, and international approval routes governing those products.

At the point of sale it employed 23 people and drew on a global network of associate consultants. Following the acquisition APC continued to trade under its own name as a business unit of the Staphyt Group.

About Staphyt

Staphyt is a French-headquartered agroscience contract research organisation serving the crop protection, biocontrol, and biocide sectors.

Its services span field experimentation, laboratory testing, regulatory advice, and registration dossier management. At the time of the transaction the group employed more than 700 professionals across Europe, North Africa, and Brazil.

Following the acquisition of APC the group operated two independent regulatory business units — APC and Staphyt Regulatory — supported by regulatory offices in eight countries.

Frequently Asked Questions

What acquirers value in agroscience regulatory consultancies

Acquirers in the agroscience services market underwrite three things above all: the technical seniority of the consultant base, the depth of relationships with substance registrants, and the recurrence built into regulatory work. Dossiers come up for renewal, active substances face periodic review, and regulations change — so a consultancy with an established client list carries a predictable forward workload rather than one-off project revenue. Buyers also test how much of the expertise sits with the founder personally versus the wider team, because a business whose registrations depend on one named individual is a materially riskier asset. Agchem Project Consulting brought 23 employees and a global associate network to the Staphyt Group, which is why the technical organisation was retained intact after completion.

Valuation is normally set on a multiple of maintainable EBITDA, adjusted for the quality of the earnings underneath it. The adjustments that move the number are client concentration, the proportion of revenue that recurs through renewal and review cycles, utilisation and charge-out rates across the consultant team, and the degree of key-person dependency. A consultancy where the top three clients account for most of the fee income will be discounted regardless of headline profitability. In a competitive sell-side process, the valuation narrative is built before buyers are approached — so that the multiple is argued from evidence rather than defended after a first offer has anchored the discussion.

Agroscience clients increasingly want one provider to take a product from field trial through laboratory analysis to a submitted registration dossier. Groups strong in trials and testing therefore need regulatory affairs capability, and that capability is difficult to build organically because it depends on experienced people who are scarce and slow to train. The UK supplies a concentration of consultants with EU and international registration experience, English-language dossier authorship that travels into export markets, and familiarity with the regulatory frameworks European buyers already work within. For Staphyt, acquiring APC filled a defined gap in its service chain rather than duplicating capacity it already held — which is the acquisition rationale most likely to support a full valuation.

The outcome depends on the acquirer's integration plan and on what has been negotiated into the deal terms. In people-based consultancies, acquirers who intend to keep the revenue generally keep the team, because clients contracted for named consultants and will follow them if they leave. The stronger structures preserve the acquired business as an identifiable unit rather than dissolving it into an existing department. Staphyt established APC and Staphyt Regulatory as two independent but complementary business units, which allowed APC to retain its brand, its staff, and its technical organisation while gaining access to the group's international offices. Founders who care about this outcome should raise it during buyer selection, not during legal drafting — by which point the leverage has largely gone.

Founder challenges: selling a UK consultancy in a regulated sector

Key-person risk suppresses valuation in every people-based business, and it takes 12 to 24 months to address properly. The work is unglamorous: move client relationships so that senior consultants other than the founder are the named contact, document methodology and dossier templates so knowledge is institutional rather than personal, and give the second tier real authority over delivery and pricing. Buyers test this directly in due diligence by asking who signs off technical work and who the client would call first. A founder who can show that revenue continues without them on every call is arguing from a materially stronger position than one who cannot.

Confidentiality is harder in a business of 20 to 30 people than in one of 300, because absences and unexplained meetings are visible. The practical controls are a tightly limited internal circle, non-disclosure agreements signed before any identifying information is released, a blind teaser that describes the business without naming it, and buyer meetings held away from the office. An advisor absorbing buyer contact also removes the most common source of leaks, which is a founder fielding approaches directly. Founders should also decide early how and when they will tell staff, because a plan communicated on the founder's terms is far better received than a rumour confirmed after the fact.

Cross-border sales add three layers to a UK process: the governing law and jurisdiction of the sale agreement, the tax treatment of consideration on both sides, and the currency in which any deferred or earn-out element is denominated and settled. Decision-making also tends to take longer, because approval may sit with a parent board or an investor in another country and diligence questions arrive filtered through a different regulatory tradition. Practically, this means building more time into the timetable and agreeing the deal structure principles early rather than discovering a mismatch at heads of terms. Overseas strategic buyers frequently pay well for UK assets that give them market access — the complexity is worth managing rather than avoiding.

Three tests matter more than the rest. First, can the advisor describe your buyer universe specifically — naming the groups whose strategy your business fits and explaining why — rather than proposing a broad auction. Second, can they construct and defend a valuation narrative in your terms, which for a technical consultancy means understanding utilisation, renewal cycles, and how a buyer will discount key-person dependency. Third, are they independent of the buyers they introduce, so that the recommendation you receive is not shaped by another relationship. CapEQ is a Certified B Corporation, independently assessed against standards that include putting client outcomes ahead of deal income, and works only on sell-side mandates for founder-led UK businesses.

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