Andrew Balgarnie

Andrew Balgarnie is an M&A adviser and licensed business broker in New Zealand, working under Auckland Business Sales. He helps owners sell through a confidential process, helps established businesses grow by acquisition, and advises on raising capital.

A broker's website usually sells by showing what is for sale. His cannot. If staff, customers or competitors learn too early that a business is on the market, the sale suffers. So the brief ran the opposite way from most: never show a business for sale, a deal or a client's name.

There were three more conditions. Every fact on the site had to trace back to something he had told us. The licence wording his brokerage requires had to appear on every page, exactly as written. And the look had to sit comfortably beside the brokerage's own brand, while he could still change the words himself.

We designed and built the site in Next.js as ten pages and three articles. The homepage gives a visitor three ways in straight away: sell, acquire, or register as a buyer. The heart of the site is the process, eight steps that keep a sale quiet, from no public listing through to planned disclosure to staff and customers. It runs as a timeline on the homepage and in full on a page of its own. Two forms take enquiries: a general one, which can arrive with the topic already chosen, and a buyer register with sectors and a budget.

The part built specially for him is the editing. Each page is defined once, as a list of fields with the current copy as the default. From that one definition come three things: the editing screens in his content studio, the check on what comes back from it, and a fallback for each field. If he has filled a field in, his words win. If a field is empty, fails the check, or the content service cannot be reached, the page falls back to its built-in copy instead of going down. He can publish articles and change the text of any page, and an edit is live within about a minute.

His first round of feedback, from a bigger name in the header to black-and-white portraits that turn to colour under the pointer, was built the day it arrived.