Preparing to sell, and what a buyer finds
The price is argued once. The findings are argued for months.
A buyer is buying an operation that runs without you, so owner dependence costs most. Fix that, make contracts transferable, tie the numbers, and diligence stops being the slow part.
Work it out in a minute
Eighteen questions across six areas. Names the one weakness holding the others in place, and the first ninety days in order.
The plan
Do these six, in order
A time against each one and a way to tell it is finished.
Write down what only you can do
Approvals, pricing, key relationships, the things nobody else knows how to run.
1 hour · Done when the list exists and each line has a named person who is not you
Hand two of them over properly
Pick the two that recur most, write the procedure, and let somebody else run them.
4 to 8 weeks · Done when both ran for a month without you being asked about them
Sort the contracts into transfers and consents
Customers, suppliers and leases. Which move on their own, which need somebody to agree.
1 week · Done when every agreement is in one of the two piles with a date against it
Reconcile every month a buyer will read
Books, bank and any figures already shown, agreeing month by month.
2 to 6 weeks · Done when the whole period ties and somebody has signed it off
Separate personal from business on paper
Spending through the company, informal loans, family arrangements.
1 day · Done when each one is either unwound or written down with an explanation
Write the procedures for what would stop
Only the things that would break if you were away for a month.
2 weeks · Done when somebody else followed each one without asking you a question
What a buyer finds
The owner is the finding
If approvals, pricing, key relationships and the knowledge of how things work all run through one person, the buyer is buying a risk they will have to manage. Every week you spend getting off the critical path is worth more than a week of polish.
Contracts that survive a change of owner
Customer agreements, supplier terms and leases that either transfer or need consent. Consents take weeks to collect and cannot be started the day somebody asks.
Numbers that tie, going back years
Books, bank and any figures already shown, agreeing month by month for the whole period a buyer will read. Reconciling during diligence means reconciling in public.
Documented, not remembered
How the work runs, written down. A buyer reading procedures is a buyer who believes the operation continues. A buyer interviewing the founder is one pricing the risk that it does not.
One version of the ownership record
Shares, options, notes and anything promised in writing, matching the signed documents rather than what everybody remembers.
Clean between you and the business
Personal spending, informal loans and family arrangements separated out before anybody external reads the accounts. It is tidy work now and an awkward question later.
What to do, and in what order
Almost every page on this subject is about valuation. Valuation is argued once, from numbers a buyer trusts. What takes months is the diligence that follows, and the findings there are operational rather than financial.
Then the numbers, for the whole period a buyer will read rather than the last quarter. Books, bank and previously shared figures agreeing month by month. A buyer who finds one month that does not tie starts checking all of them.
Questions we get
How far ahead should we start?
A year is comfortable. Six months is workable. Under three months and the only things you can fix are the fast ones.
Owner dependence is the slow item, and it is the one that moves the outcome most.
Do you value the business?
No. Valuation is a different discipline and there are people who do only that.
This is the operational work that makes a valuation defensible and the diligence behind it short.
Our books are behind. Is that fatal?
No, but it sets the timeline. The months a buyer reads have to be rebuilt properly rather than estimated.
Establishing which months those are is usually an afternoon.
What do buyers find most often?
In order: the owner is the operation, contracts that need consent nobody sought, numbers that do not reconcile, and personal spending mixed into the accounts.
All four are fixable in advance and expensive to meet for the first time in a data room.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Read next
Getting off the critical path, writing down how the work runs, and the diligence itself from the other side of the table.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built