What your business is worth is decided before you list it.
By the time a buyer reads your numbers, the price is mostly set. What moves it is the eighteen months before that.
What’s still possible, and when.
Changes the number
Enough runway for fixes to show up in a full trailing year. Pricing corrected, losing work dropped. The earnings a buyer verifies are the improved ones.
Cleans the story
Books made defensible. What doesn’t tie gets reconciled. You walk into diligence without surprises.
Damage control
The number is set. This protects the price rather than raising it.
Every dollar of earnings is multiplied at close.
Four times is illustrative. Real multiples vary by industry, size and buyer. The first chunk usually comes from work quoted years ago against costs that have moved since. You don’t run the business differently. You just know which jobs actually earn.
Someone is going to audit your numbers. Better it’s us first.
A serious buyer runs a quality-of-earnings review, line by line. Everything it finds that you didn’t know becomes a reason to lower the price or hold money back. The expensive version is the one where you’re surprised.
Big Four transaction advisory. Buy-side diligence on PE deals at a global bank. We’ve been the people sent in to check whether the numbers hold up. Useful to have on your side of the table for once.
What we do, and what we don’t.
- Make the earnings real, and provable
- Find the margin leaks and close them
- Get the books able to survive someone else’s accountant
- Document what a buyer will ask about
- Market or list your business
- Issue a valuation
- Take a piece of the sale
- Replace your broker or M&A attorney
What owners ask us
How far ahead should we start?
Eighteen months is where this changes the number. A buyer looks at a trailing period, not a snapshot. Sixty days out we can still make diligence less painful, but that’s damage control.
Are you brokers?
No. We don’t market your business, issue valuations, or take a piece of the sale. Our job is that the numbers your broker works with are clean and worth more.
What actually raises the number?
Earnings that were always there but couldn’t be seen or proven. Fixing that raises EBITDA, and EBITDA is what gets multiplied.
We’re not sure we’re selling. Still worth it?
The work is the same either way. A business you can see clearly is easier to run and worth more to sell. Most owners we work with aren’t sure yet.
What if our books are a mess?
That’s the normal starting point, and a reason to start early. A buyer’s diligence will find it either way. The only choice is whether it’s us first, with time to fix things, or their accountant at the table.
Start before you need to.
Every engagement starts with a Read. If it finds less than it costs, you don’t pay.