How We Simplified a Complex Manufacturing Group and Achieved a 100% Cash Business Exit

In 1989, a teenager started making red braai grid "knypers" (braai tongs) with his father in the garage.

By 2025, Johan’s business, LK Products, had become a brand you see everywhere. Pick 'n Pay, Checkers, Builders, and every hardware store. Those red knypers? They’re LK Products.

But when it came time to sell, Johan faced a problem most successful manufacturers eventually hit: the business was getting too big for him to add value. Three entities. Complex intercompany relationships. Import 40%, manufacture 60%. Margins sitting in different entities. The kind of structure that makes buyers nervous.

This is where most business sales go wrong.

Buyers look at complexity and build conservatism into their offers. They assume risks they can’t see. They discount for uncertainties they can’t quantify. And sellers end up accepting deals where they’re kept as shareholders because buyers won’t pay cash for what they don’t fully understand.

Johan wanted something different. A 100% exit. Cash upfront. No lingering involvement beyond consulting. The kind of clean exit that, frankly, almost never happens in manufacturing.

In this article, I share how we at Deal Leaders International (DLI) made that happen.

If Buyers Don’t Understand It, They Won’t Pay For It

When DLI Advisory Executive, Taryn Henkel, joined the LK Products transaction in early 2023, the business had already been to market once. Interest was strong. Meetings happened. But something wasn’t connecting.

Potential buyers were looking at the business and saying, “We don’t really get it.”

Not because LK Products wasn’t valuable. But because the full picture wasn’t clear. When you distribute certain product categories to certain stores, buyers only see fragments of what you actually do. They miss the breadth. They underestimate the distribution network. They don’t grasp how the pieces fit together.

Taryn recognised this immediately. Before going back to the buyers, she needed to solve two problems:

First, make the business visible in a way that reveals its true scope. Second, make the financials so clean and comprehensible that buyers could see exactly what they were acquiring—no surprises, no hidden risks, no reasons to be conservative.

The first problem got solved with something brilliant: an open day event.

Making Complexity Visible Changes Everything

LK Products hosted an event for customers and salespeople. They rented a warehouse and filled it with their entire product range under one roof. This was rare. In their normal model, distributors only carry certain categories. You’d never see the full catalogue in one place.

Taryn and the team invited a handful of carefully selected potential acquirers to that event.

The reaction was immediate. Buyers walked through and suddenly understood what they’d been looking at on paper but hadn’t truly grasped. The brand. The range. The positioning. The potential.

One of those buyers eventually became the acquirer. Another became the main challenger who pushed the deal to premium levels.

But here’s what matters: that event worked because it showed buyers something they couldn’t see from financial statements alone. It made the business visible in a way that changed perception.

Most advisors never think this way. They assume buyers will figure it out from documents. Taryn knew better. If buyers don’t get it, they won’t pay for it.

Now the harder part: making the financials bulletproof.

Working with CFOs to Prepare What buyers Will Scrutinise

LK Products wasn’t a single entity. It was three entities in a group structure. Import operations, manufacturing and distribution. Significant intercompany activity. Margins sitting in different entities.

Taryn spent months working closely with the business’s Financial Director.

Not just reviewing financials. Actually unpacking them. Understanding the reasons for every reconciliation item. Mapping how cash flowed between entities. Documenting where margins were generated and why.

This is unglamorous work. It’s the kind of preparation most business owners assume happens automatically. It doesn’t.

The financial team of LK Products had done something critical: they’d maintained clean, timely monthly management accounts for years. This resulted in very few adjustments between management accounts and financial statements.

That consistency meant Taryn could track performance against budget continuously. They knew exactly where the business was heading. And when they uploaded thousands of documents to the data room during due diligence, this enabled Taryn to answer buyer questions immediately—because she knew what was in every document.

Here’s why this matters more than most people realise.

When Your Numbers Hold, Buyers Pay Cash

The LK Products transaction took time. Offers came in August 2023. The deal was concluded in March 2025. That’s a long gap—plenty of time for performance to diverge from projections, for buyers to discover problems, for conservatism to creep into valuations.

But the numbers held. Everything stacked up throughout.

A year later, the financial story was identical to what buyers had seen initially. No surprises. No adjustments. No reasons for buyers to doubt their assumptions or build risk premiums into the structure.

That’s why a large listed South African corporate, a sophisticated acquirer with extensive M&A experience, was willing to do something almost unheard of in manufacturing: pay 100% cash upfront at a phenomenal multiple.

Every single person Johan had spoken to before Deal Leaders said the same thing: “We want to keep you as a shareholder.” Partial exits. Earnouts. Ongoing involvement.

But this buyer didn’t need that. They understood the business completely. They’d done similar deals. They had the war chest. And most importantly, they had complete confidence in what they were buying because the preparation work was so thorough.

Taryn put it simply: “It’s so rare. This is one of the few deals where we ticked pretty much all of his boxes.”

The Price of 100% Deals: Warranties You Have to be Willing to Sign

Here’s the part most sellers don’t anticipate.

Clean exits come with extensive warranties. Tax warranties from complex restructuring. Environmental warranties from manufacturing operations.

LK Products makes braai grids. That means dipping steel in acid and other chemicals. The factory was busy, not particularly tidy. Signing away warranties with big numbers attached to environmental risk was stressful for Johan.

But it was the price of a clean exit. And because Taryn and the team had done the preparation work—understanding the risks, documenting the compliance, making everything transparent—those warranties were defensible, not deal-killers.

This is the trade-off most owners eventually face: partial exits with lower risk to you, or full exits where you carry warranty risk but walk away with cash and certainty.

The preparation work determines whether that second option is even possible.

Why the Buyer “Got It” When Others Didn’t

The acquirer was a large, diversified South African corporate that does dozens of acquisitions. They had existing household brands—but a gap in their outdoor range.

LK Products was perfectly complementary. The distribution network was phenomenal. The operational expertise would combine with their homeware experience to create real synergies.

But they could only see that because the business was prepared properly. The financial story was clear. The complexity was explained. The open day event showed them the full scope. And the due diligence process didn’t produce surprises.

At the celebratory dinner in March 2025, after the deal finally closed following months in the Competition Commission, you could see the relief on Johan’s face.

He’d carried the burden of a complex, growing business for decades. He’d built something remarkable from literally nothing—starting in his father’s garage before he finished school.

And now he could walk away knowing the business would thrive under new ownership while he enjoyed his red wine and T-bone steaks, completely free of the stress and pressure he’d carried for so long.

That’s what great advisory work creates. Not just financial outcomes, but human outcomes.

What This Means For Your Business

If you’re running a business with complexity—multiple entities, manufacturing plus distribution, intercompany relationships that work in practice but look messy on paper—here’s what you need to understand:

Buyers will pay premium multiples for complexity they understand. They’ll discount heavily for complexity they don’t.

The difference isn’t the business. It’s the preparation. Taryn’s work with LK Products wasn’t magic. It was methodical:

Financial Preparation: Working with the CFO to understand and document every aspect of the financial structure. Making sure management accounts reconcile perfectly with audited financials. Preparing for the questions buyers will ask before they ask them.

Visibility Work: Finding ways to show buyers what makes the business valuable—not just tell them. Making the intangible tangible. Turning data into understanding.

Process Discipline: Uploading thousands of documents. Knowing what’s in each one. Being able to answer questions immediately because the preparation was thorough.

Outcome Management: Understanding what sellers actually want (Johan wanted a clean exit, not ongoing involvement) and structuring the process to attract buyers who can deliver that.

This is what creates 100% cash exits at phenomenal multiples in spaces where most advisors tell you that’s impossible.

Your Next Move

If you’re running a business with structural complexity, multiple entities, or manufacturing operations that make perfect sense to you but might confuse buyers, you need advisors who know how to prepare businesses for the scrutiny sophisticated acquirers apply.

We work with your financial team months before going to market. We understand that buyer confidence comes from preparation, not presentation. We know how to make complexity comprehensible without oversimplifying what makes your business valuable.

Book a conversation with us. We’ll walk you through exactly how we prepare businesses for the kind of scrutiny that leads to premium exits, and why that preparation work matters more than anything else when the offers come in.

If you want to hear Taryn walk through the complete LK Products journey, including the 18-month Section 42 delay, the open day strategy and the Competition Commission process, watch Episode 5 of “At the Table with Rick Grantham.”