Before you sell the business, it is worth finding out what the buyer is going to find.
I help owners of established businesses work out which operational, technology and organisational issues a buyer or successor is going to worry about, and then fix the ones that are actually worth fixing before the business goes to market. Keep in mind that this is usually a fairly short list, and quite often the right answer for a particular issue is to leave it alone and simply document it.
A very large number of owners are going to sell or hand over in the next few years, and most of their businesses are not yet in a state where that is easy.
of German Mittelstand owners are 55 or older, which is more than two million people.
KFW · NACHFOLGE-MONITORING 2025German SMEs a year are looking for a succession solution through 2029.
KFW RESEARCHof U.S. businesses are owned by Baby Boomers.
EXIT PLANNING INSTITUTEof businesses that are put up for sale actually sell. The rest are generally withdrawn, sold at a discount, or eventually closed.
EXIT PLANNING INSTITUTEWhat a buyer is really paying for is a business that keeps working after you have left.
Whether it is an external buyer, a family member or your own management team, the person taking over is essentially asking the same question, i.e. will this company keep functioning, producing cash and keeping its customers without depending on you or on two or three long-serving employees who could leave at any time?
Technology comes into it because it is usually the visible part of a deeper problem. If the systems are old and disconnected, you generally also find manual workarounds, knowledge that only exists in people’s heads, data that cannot be exported cleanly, and management reporting that consists of the owner knowing the numbers rather than anyone being able to look them up.
To a buyer, a weakly digitised company looks like a capital project that they will have to pay for the day after closing, and they will price that in (or, quite often, simply walk away). So it reduces the number of people who will bid, makes the financing harder, and generally ends up as a lower price than the profits would justify.
I do not replace your broker, your accountant or your exit planner. I do the hands-on operational work that they usually identify but are not set up to deliver.
Your existing advisers will generally tell you that the business is too dependent on you, or that the reporting is weak, and they are usually right. But somebody then has to go and fix it, and that is the part I do, which means your advisers stay involved and I work alongside them rather than in competition with them.
| Adviser | Their role | What they typically find | The gap I own |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business broker / M&A adviser | Value, market, negotiate and transact | Buyer objections, weak preparation | The hands-on operational fixes before the business goes to market |
| Exit planner / CEPA / Nachfolgeberater | Coordinate exit and succession planning | Value gaps and owner readiness | Implementing the technology, process and data changes |
| CPA / fractional CFO / Steuerberater | Financial readiness, tax, reporting | Financial clean-up and profit issues | The operational causes behind the numbers |
| IT consultant / MSP | Systems and infrastructure | Technical debt and security | Deciding what is worth doing from the buyer’s point of view rather than the vendor’s |
| Fractional COO | Operational performance | Process and management gaps | A time-limited mandate that ends when the business is ready to be sold |
Ten dimensions of transferability.
The Sale Readiness Assessment is a structured questionnaire that adapts to your company size, sector, your role, how far away the sale is and the likely type of buyer, so a dental practice and a light manufacturer do not get the same questions. It also tries to get past the easy answers, e.g. it asks not only whether the data exists but whether management actually uses it, and not only whether a process is documented but whether another competent person could run it from the documentation.
Owner dependency
Decisions, relationships, delivery, approvals, sales and knowledge held by the owner.
Processes & documentation
SOP coverage, reproducibility, onboarding, vendor and customer workflows.
Revenue & customer resilience
Recurring revenue, churn, concentration, referral dependence, owner-held accounts.
Technology architecture
Legacy systems, integration, data portability, unsupported software, contracts, security.
Data quality & transferability
Customer and patient data, consent, duplicates, document structure, exportability, access.
Management information
KPIs, management cadence, margin visibility, pipeline, capacity, retention.
Key-person dependency
Single points of human failure, cross-training, passwords, undocumented knowledge.
Automation & admin efficiency
Manual repetitive work in scheduling, invoicing, follow-up, approvals and reporting.
Team & organisation
Roles, management layer, decision rights, retention, incentives.
Transition risk
Licences, leases, contracts, permissions, vendor continuity, the 30/60/90-day handover.
The Quick Readiness Check is free and takes about ten minutes. You get a score straight away, together with the three issues that a buyer would most likely raise, and you can decide from there whether the full assessment is worth doing.
Take the Sale Readiness AssessmentNot everything should be fixed before a sale, and some things definitely should not be.
Replacing the ERP six months before you sell is usually a mistake, because you will spend the money and the buyer will probably replace it again anyway. So every issue gets weighed on how much it matters to a buyer, how much effort it takes and how long it takes, and then it goes into one of three buckets. I should say that I have no interest in the third bucket being empty, i.e. I do not earn anything from recommending more work than is needed, and the advice is only worth having if that stays true.
Issues that matter a lot to a buyer and can be fixed in weeks.
Things like the owner approving routine pricing, having no regular KPI view, or one employee being the only person who can do the billing. These are the issues that make a buyer nervous, and most of them can be corrected within 30 to 90 days at fairly modest cost.
Real issues, but not worth spending capital on before closing.
Ageing hardware that still works, or a workflow with a few quirks that nevertheless does the job. Here the sensible thing is to write it down properly, make the dependency visible in the documentation and let the buyer make an informed decision about it after the sale.
Large, slow projects that the buyer will probably want to do their own way.
A legacy practice management or ERP system that is stable and can export its data is a good example. Migrating it is a 6 to 12 month project, and the buyer will very likely have their own preferred system, so doing it now means spending your money on their preferences.
| Typical finding | Buyer impact | Effort | Time | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Owner approves routine pricing | High | Medium | 60–90 days | Fix before sale |
| No KPI dashboard | High | Low | 30 days | Fix before sale |
| One employee owns the billing process | High | Medium | 30–60 days | Fix + cross-train |
| Old but functioning office hardware | Low | Low | 30 days | Document |
| Legacy ERP / EHR, stable and exportable | Medium | Very high | 6–12 months | Leave for buyer |
A short list of what actually matters, rather than a catalogue of everything that could be improved.
For each material issue the report explains, in plain language, what a buyer or successor would see and why it would bother them, because that is generally more useful than a technical description. One thing you will not find in the report is a promised increase in the sale price. I can tell you which risks have been closed and which operational numbers have moved, but the price is set by the market and your broker, and anyone who guarantees you an uplift is guessing.
- Readiness score from 0–100 with a maturity band.
- Ten-dimension risk heatmap.
- Top five transferability risks and the buyer’s view of each.
- Top five quick wins.
- 90-day, 180-day and leave-for-buyer roadmap.
- Evidence checklist, i.e. the documents and data needed to validate the answers.
- Remediation complexity rated low, medium or high per issue.
- Red flags for specialist review, e.g. cyber, tax, legal, HR or regulatory.
- An adviser recommendation: ready to market · market with caution · optimise first · major readiness gap.
You can start small and stop at any stage.
The assessment is priced separately from the implementation work, and quite a few owners stop after the assessment and hand the report to their own team, which is perfectly fine. Also, I do not sell software and I am not paid by anyone who does, so when the report says you need a new system it is because you do, and when it says you do not, that is also what I mean.
| Engagement | Purpose | Scope | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quick Readiness Check | Orientation | A short online check with an immediate score and the three issues a buyer would most likely raise. | Free |
| Sale Readiness Assessment | Diagnostic | The full assessment, a review call with me to go through the answers, and a prioritised report. | $2,500 / €2,500 |
| Operational Readiness Review | Deep diagnostic | Interviews with you and your key people, a map of the systems, a review of the main processes, and an analysis of the KPIs and data. | $7,500 / €7,500 |
| 90-Day Readiness Sprint | Implementation | Your top three to five fixes from the assessment, with me leading the work and your team doing most of it. | $15,000 / €15,000 |
| 180-Day Value & Transferability Programme | Larger transformation | For businesses with more to do, e.g. building a second management layer, automating the admin, fixing the reporting and closing revenue leaks. | On request |
Owner-led businesses that are profitable, but where too much still depends on the owner.
The businesses I work with are generally large enough that operational weaknesses make a real difference to the price, and small enough that there is no internal team to fix them. In practice that means enterprise values of roughly $1m to $20m in the U.S. and €1m to €20m in Germany, and ideally 6 to 24 months before the planned sale or handover. If you are already three weeks from signing, it is probably too late for this and your broker’s advice matters more than mine.
There are a few things I deliberately do not do.
- I do not value the business, broker the transaction or negotiate on your behalf. That is your broker’s or M&A adviser’s job and they are better at it than I am.
- I do not give legal, tax or regulatory advice. If I see an issue in one of those areas I will flag it and point you to the right specialist.
- I do not promise a higher sale price, for the reasons explained above.
- I do not take referral fees or a share of the transaction from anyone, and I contract with you directly, so there is nobody else’s interest in the advice.
You handle the transaction, and I get the business into a state where it can be sold.
You probably see this fairly regularly, i.e. a business that could be sold but really ought to spend three to six months fixing a few operational things first, and you have nobody to hand that work to, so it either goes to market as it is or the owner puts it off for another year. That is the work I take on, and I do it without touching your mandate or your fee.
Adviser triage
A short check that you can run on any seller client in about fifteen minutes, which tells you whether the business is essentially ready to go to market, should optimise first, or needs a deeper look before you spend time on it.
Clean referral model
Non-exclusive and in both directions. You introduce the seller, I contract with them directly, and there are no success fees or referral commissions in either direction, so there is nothing that creates a professional ethics problem for you or for me.
Portfolio diagnostic
If you have several seller clients, I can run the triage across all of them at once and give you a co-branded or white-label report, so you can see where each of them stands before a buyer does.
Try the adviser triage on a real client. It takes about fifteen minutes and gives you an immediate readiness band and a recommended next step, and there is no charge.
Run the adviser triage