Ask an owner what their business is worth and you hear about turnover, the order book and comparable deals. Ask the buyer’s adviser and you hear a different vocabulary: sustainability of earnings, customer concentration, key-person risk, transferability. The gap between those vocabularies is where value leaks in almost every sale.
Buyers pay for what they can verify. Affection, reputation and craft are real, but they are priced only when they are evidenced; and evidence has a build time. Four assets consistently move the number. First, proof of demand: independent customer research showing why clients choose you, what they would pay more for, and whether they would stay under new ownership; a perception study conducted now reads very differently in a data room than testimonials gathered in a hurry. Second, a transferable proposition: where you play, how you win and why, written down, priced and consistently told; if the strategy lives in the founder’s head, the buyer discounts for the head leaving. Third, a commercial engine that runs without you: pipeline discipline, pricing logic, sales tools, accountable roles; every process that depends on the owner is a deduction. Fourth, a brand that means something specific: not decoration, but a name that carries a promise the market can state back; we watched this logic play out when Marley was strengthened ahead of its acquisition, and when Symrise sharpened its corporate story before its IPO.
The timing rule is simple and widely ignored: two years is comfortable, one year is tight, six months is triage. Tax changes have made timing more expensive to get wrong; and private buyers are most generous to the businesses that need them least.
The objection writes itself: what if we never sell? Then you have spent two years making the business more profitable, less dependent on you and easier to run; which is also the honest definition of succession-readiness, whether the successor is a buyer, a family member or a management team.
The work is confidential by nature, and it starts with a conversation rather than a programme.
Questions this raises
- What is exit-readiness?
- How long before a sale should we start?
- Does this apply to family succession?
- Is the process confidential?
