The first thing a buyer prices
Owner dependence
Who signs, who the top ten customers phone, who holds the pricing in their head. An owner who cannot take three weeks off is selling a job, and every acquirer knows how to discount one.
M&A advisory and business brokerage
Unsaleable businesses look exactly like saleable ones
From the outside, and from the inside too. The owner has a turnover figure, a number in their head and a retirement date. They have no idea how much of the value walks out of the door with them. They find that out when they go to market, which is the most expensive possible moment to learn it.
Not open yet. Ours scores your own pipeline rather than a client’s business, and it is four minutes on the other side of the screen.
Exit readiness score
Question 1 of 9
Sample questionHow much of the business runs through you?
Every decision comes through meMost of the big ones doIt runs for a month without me
Where mandates come from now
Your pipeline is other people’s address books
Accountants and lawyers send you the owners they happen to know are thinking about it. That is a good source and a fixed one, and it has never once sent you somebody early.
What referral brings
An owner who has already decided to sell, introduced by somebody they trust. The best kind of conversation and the latest possible one, because by then the preparation years are behind them and cannot be recovered.
What it never brings
The owner three years out, who has not told their accountant anything, and who is quietly wondering what the business is worth. That is the person whose next three years decide the price, and nobody is talking to them.
The valuation conversation you offer instead is free, informal and almost entirely unqualified. Some of those hours are the beginning of a mandate. Most of them are an owner satisfying their curiosity at your expense, and you cannot tell which is which until you are an hour in.
Who is actually in the decision
An owner selling a business is never deciding alone
A spouse who is also a shareholder, a finance director, the accountant of twenty years, a son or daughter in the business, and eventually a solicitor.
13 and 9
You will meet two of them.
The rest form their view from whatever the owner brings home, which today is a recollection of a conversation. A readiness report can be handed across a kitchen table and read without you there. It is the only version of your argument most of these people will ever see.
Which is why the result is written as a document rather than as a score with a call to action stapled to it. It gets forwarded, and the forwarding is the point.
What we would build
The exit readiness score
Nine questions, six factors, one band, and a plain statement of what each gap does to an offer. It is not a valuation and it never pretends to be one.
Decides whether an earn-out is needed
Management depth
A second line that runs the business without escalation is the difference between a clean exit and three years of deferred consideration with conditions attached.
Changes the shape of the offer
Revenue quality
Contracted and recurring, or won again every January. Two businesses with identical turnover and different revenue quality do not get the same offers, and the owner of the second one has never been told why.
The most common deal breaker
Customer concentration
A customer who accounts for most of the revenue is not a customer, it is a condition of sale. Owners tend to read it as loyalty rather than as risk, because the relationship feels permanent from the inside.
Where deals stall in diligence
Contract transferability
Change of control clauses, handshake arrangements, leases and licences in the wrong name. None of it is visible from the accounts and all of it surfaces at the worst possible moment.
Sets how long preparation takes
Financial hygiene
Whether the numbers survive a buyer's accountant reading them. Personal costs in the business, informal arrangements, a year end that nobody has tidied since the last one.
Six factors, weighted, because they are not equal. Financial hygiene costs an owner a few months of tidying. Owner dependence costs them years, and the score has to make that difference obvious in the first screen of the result.
What the band decides
Both answers are billable, which is what makes this worth building
Most diagnostics have one good outcome and a polite exit for everybody else. This one has two good outcomes, and the larger of them is the band you currently turn away.
Scores low, and most do
A paid preparation programme
This owner is two or three years from a sale they cannot yet have. Told plainly, with the gaps named and priced, that is not a rejection: it is the first time anybody has given them a plan. Preparation work is the most under-sold service in this sector and the score is what makes it purchasable.
Scores high, and few do
A mandate conversation
Ready, and now demonstrably so. The call opens with six factors already scored, not with a request for last year's accounts. The owner arrives believing the valuation conversation, because they did the arithmetic themselves.
The preparation track is the one that changes the business. Three years of fees sit in front of a mandate that would otherwise have arrived cold. The owner also arrives at market ready, which is better for the price and better for your reputation with buyers.
What they walk away with
A band, the gaps in order, and how long each one takes to close
Written for an owner who has never sold a business before, and readable by the accountant who will be asked about it on Monday.
The band
Where they are today, in one word and one honest paragraph. The lowest band says the business would struggle to sell, because a band that flatters everybody destroys the credibility of the top one.
The gaps, priced
Each factor with what it does to an offer, in the language buyers actually use. Conditions, earn-outs, longer diligence, a smaller pool of interested acquirers.
The timeline
What can be fixed in a quarter, what takes two years, and what cannot be fixed at all. This is the page that gets pinned to a wall, and it is the reason the next call happens.
Where the traffic comes from
Owners research this privately, years before they mention it
Which is exactly why search and long-form content are the two channels that matter here, and why nothing gated works.
Channel
Search
“Is my business saleable”, “how much is my business worth”, “selling a business with one big customer”. Searched at ten at night, from home, by somebody who has told nobody. They land on a valuation calculator or a contact form, and both feel like a trap.
Channel
Content and webinars
Exit planning seminars fill rooms with people three years out and collect a list of names. Ending on the score turns that room into a ranked list with a reason to call each one.
Not a media channel
Accountants and lawyers
They cannot introduce a client who has not raised it. They can forward something useful to every owner on their books, and that is a different and much larger number.
What it takes
You already know what an unsaleable business looks like
You have seen fifty of them. Getting that onto one page, weighted, is the project, and it is the part nobody else can do for you.
We draft the six factors and the bands. You argue with them, because your view of what kills a deal in your sector and your size band is the asset here. Nothing gets designed until that page is signed, and everything after it is questions, wording, the report and the routing.
Three packages, fixed scope. The prices are not published yet because they are not final, and when they are they go on the packages page in numbers rather than behind a form.
Questions
What advisers ask before they put their name on one
Do not change it. Feed it. A referring accountant has the same problem you do: they can tell a client is thinking about retiring and they have nothing to hand them. A readiness score is the thing they forward, and it comes back with your name on it. It reaches the owners who were never going to be mentioned to you at all.
Your turn
You would not take a business to market without testing it first
Ours tests the four things that decide whether the owners reading your site ever become mandates. Four minutes, a score, and a report naming the weakest of the four.
Not open yet. When it opens, the score and the report are yours whether or not we ever speak.