Exit readiness: the year before sale.

Most owners think they’re selling a business.
A buyer thinks they’re buying future cash flow, minus uncertainty.

So the first job is to stop describing the business like a personal achievement and start describing it like a system.

What to do now

• Write a one-page “how money is made here” explanation without using the word “I” and without naming people.
• List what would break if you disappeared for 90 days.
• Identify where the value really lives:

• Process and systems.
• Team capability.
• Contracts and recurring revenue.
• Or… relationships and heroics.

If the business can’t be explained without you as the glue, you’re not selling a company yet. You’re selling a job with risk attached.

This is the big one. And it’s also the one people avoid because it bruises the ego a bit.

If you close the deals, calm the big clients, fix the escalations, and “keep standards high,” buyers see a business that depends on a single nervous system. Yours.

They discount that. Or they insist you stay longer. Or they structure the deal with conditions.

What to do now

List the revenue actions you personally touch:

• Closing.
• Renewals.
• Pricing approvals.
• Client escalation handling.
• Relationship maintenance.

Move day-to-day ownership to the team.
Keep yourself in the story, but make it non-critical. Think: occasional presence, not daily dependence.
Make sales, renewals, and client care visible in a system, not trapped in your head or WhatsApp threads.

A simple test: if you go away for a week, does revenue slow down or does delivery wobble?
If yes, fix that first.

Buyers don’t reward creativity in the accounts.
They reward clarity.

If your numbers require a long explanation, or if management accounts look like one thing and tax returns look like another, you’re going to get dragged into a slow, suspicious due diligence process.

That turns into either a discount or a deal that dies.

What to do now

• Separate personal and “lifestyle” costs from business costs, properly.
• Normalise EBITDA once, cleanly. Then stop relabelling recurring costs as “one-offs.”
• Standardise revenue recognition and cost treatment so the story is consistent month to month.

Produce the basics without drama:

• 3 to 5 years of financials.
• Tax returns that tie back.
• AR and AP ageing.
• Debt schedule.
• Forecast logic that isn’t fantasy.

If you can’t explain margin changes without hand-waving, a buyer will assume there’s a leak.

Buyers don’t just buy earnings. They buy the machine that produces them.

They want to understand, quickly:

• Who does what.
• Using which tools.
• With what authority.
• And how decisions actually get made.

What to do now

Document core workflows end-to-end:

• Sales to onboarding.
• Delivery to QA.
• Support to escalation handling.
• Monthly finance cycle.

Define decision rights, not just responsibilities.
Reduce tool sprawl that hides ownership.
Kill informal escalation routes that rely on you.

This isn’t documentation for its own sake.
It’s proof that the business has shape.

Owners often jump to performance because it feels like progress.

But if roles are fuzzy, performance improvements don’t stick. You just get bursts of activity, then drift.

Buyers want predictability.
Predictability comes from clear ownership.

What to do now

• Rewrite roles around outcomes, not task lists.
• Separate oversight from execution.
• Remove overlaps where two people think they own the same thing.
• Identify “compensator roles.” These are roles that exist purely because a process is broken.

If two people own the same thing, buyers assume no one does. And they’re usually right.

Risk doesn’t kill deals.
Hidden risk kills deals.

Buyers expect issues. They hate surprises.

So you’re not trying to pretend you’re perfect. You’re trying to show you know where the risks are, and you’re not in denial about them.

What to do now

Identify single points of failure:

• One customer too big.
• One supplier too critical.
• One person who holds key knowledge.
• One system no one understands.

Put mitigation in place and document it:

• Secondary suppliers.
• Cross-training.
• Contracts extended or formalised.
• Process knowledge written down.

Get compliance boring:

• Licences, policies, security basics, HR basics.

Nothing fancy. Just tidy and defensible.

The goal is buyer confidence. Confidence comes from visible control.

This is where sellers get caught out.

They assume the team will stay because “we’re a family.”
Buyers assume people will leave because change is stressful.

Both can be wrong. But buyers price based on their assumption, not yours.

What to do now

• Identify key employees that keep the engine running.
• Retention bonuses.
• Clear progression or role security.
• Equity or phantom equity, if appropriate.

Remove incentives that rely on founder proximity.
Make sure managers can operate under external ownership.

If performance depends on loyalty to you, a buyer will price in churn.

Buyers don’t just review documents. They test stories.

• Why are you selling?
• Why now?
• What breaks at scale?
• What have you fixed already?
• What remains unfixed, and why?

What to do now

• Agree one honest story internally. No contradictions between leaders.
• Avoid future-promise language like “once we get investment…”

Anchor everything in evidence:

• Trends.
• Contracts.
• Process reality.
• Customer retention.

Be upfront about constraints, and show mitigations already in motion.

A credible story beats a perfect story.

Scrambling in the final 90 days is how deals drag on, confidence dips, and buyers start playing games.

A good data room feels boring. That’s the point.

What to do now

• Create the folder structure and start populating it monthly.
• Keep documents current, not “polished.”

Ensure consistency across:

• Financials.
• Contracts.
• Org chart.
• Policies.
• Reporting.

If a document creates questions you can’t answer quickly, you’re not ready.

This is where people do damage while trying to look impressive.

Don’t:

• Replatform core systems unless it’s unavoidable and you can prove stability afterward.
• Do a big restructure without first making ownership and decision rights clear.
• Chase growth that trashes margin or increases churn.
• Add complexity to look “enterprise-ready.”

Buyers pay for clarity and control.
They don’t pay for chaos wrapped in ambition.