Where this fits
Are you ready to sell your business? Sell-side readiness is about understanding what buyers will find — and what needs to be addressed before a sale process starts. Demand → Pricing → Cash → EBITDA → Network → Visibility → Value
Where this fits
Are you ready to sell your business? Sell-side readiness is about understanding what buyers will find — and what needs to be addressed before a sale process starts. Demand → Pricing → Cash → EBITDA → Network → Visibility → Value
What happens is the business looks strong internally, but under diligence the gaps become visible — and the buyer uses them to reprice the deal.
If this isn't controlled before exit, it won't be recovered in the deal.
Sell-side readiness cannot be created in the months before a sale process. Each element requires a track record that only time can build.
24+ Months Before
Transfer key customer relationships to commercial teams. Delegate operational decisions. Document institutional knowledge. Build management depth that can be demonstrated to buyers with a credible track record.
18 Months Before
Floor margins, exception approval processes, customer-level margin visibility. Buyers will perform a customer-level margin analysis. The pricing governance track record needs to be visible in at least 4–6 quarters of management accounts before diligence.
12 Months Before
Establish the working capital profile that will inform the peg. Improve management reporting to institutional quality — buyers will assess whether management information systems demonstrate operational control. Develop a conservative normalisation narrative.
6 Months Before
Adviser selection, information memorandum, data room preparation, management presentation. The document layer. Meaningful only once the operational foundation exists — because the documents describe a reality, not create one.
Move the levers and see how founder independence, team depth and operating visibility shape the transferability of a business. No account required. Nothing stored.
I don't rely on opinion — I quantify value creation pathways. These tools are what I use in the first 30 days of every operating partner mandate.
The gap between how founders describe their business and how buyers interpret it is a consistent source of value destruction in transactions. The Founder vs PE Language translation addresses this directly.
EBITDA as reported rarely equals EBITDA as a buyer will underwrite it. Normalisation, add-backs and quality of earnings adjustments all affect the number that gets priced.
Buyers apply a quality of earnings lens before accepting any EBITDA figure. Understanding how this works before the process starts is a material advantage.
EBITDA and enterprise value are related but not equivalent — the multiple applied depends heavily on what a buyer can confirm in diligence.
Founder exit readiness is the preparation that makes sell-side readiness possible — the operating disciplines must exist before a business can withstand buyer scrutiny and protect its valuation.
Operational due diligence readiness is the operating evidence layer of sell-side readiness — the ten categories a buyer will examine in diligence must be prepared before the process begins.
Operator advisory for businesses approaching sale provides the independent view a founder needs before engaging advisers — what a buyer will find, what needs to be fixed, and whether the current valuation expectation is defensible.
Sell-side readiness assumes the decision to sell has been made. If the decision is still open, whether to sell to private equity addresses the commercial, operational and personal considerations before that decision is final.
For businesses requiring embedded operating support during sale preparation, an operating partner mandate provides the operational leadership to build the evidence that buyers require.
The Operating Partner Library™ contains the deployment architecture for operating partner interventions during sale preparation — 100-day plans, leadership transition frameworks and value creation planning tools.
Sell-side readiness preparation addresses what private equity looks for in a business — the operating evidence that supports valuation and withstands the scrutiny of a professional buyer's diligence process.
What buyers look for in management teams is a primary component of sell-side readiness — management dependency, succession depth and delegation quality are all tested in the first week of diligence.
Sell-side readiness preparation that includes operational context gives M&A advisers the operational support they need to answer buyer diligence questions with operating evidence, not just financial data.
Accountants preparing sell-side documentation benefit from operational support — the commercial explanation behind EBITDA normalisation, working capital movements and management cost adjustments that buyers will question.
Sell-side readiness preparation follows the same logic as a first 90 day operating mandate — diagnose the gaps, prioritise the fixes and build the operating evidence before external scrutiny applies it as a valuation adjustment.
The operating evidence assembled during sell-side readiness preparation directly affects the post-acquisition leadership requirement — better operating disciplines at point of sale means less remediation in the first 90 days after close.