An offer arriving in your inbox doesn't mean the business is ready to be sold well.
Most founders get one real acquisition conversation worth taking seriously, and by
the time a buyer is asking questions, it's usually too late to fix the answers.
Readiness work has to start before the offer, not after it.
Six questions worth answering honestly before you're at the table:
1. Can the business run 90 days without you?
If the honest answer is no, that's not a disclosure problem — it's a valuation
problem. A buyer isn't just pricing revenue; they're pricing whether it keeps
working once you're gone. See
the systems that let a
founder step back for where this usually starts.
2. Will the numbers survive diligence, not just your own comfort?
Financials that make sense to you and financials that hold up under a third
party's scrutiny are different bars. Reconciled, consistent, and explainable
beats optimistic every time a buyer's accountant starts asking why.
3. How concentrated is your revenue?
A business where one or two accounts make up a large share of revenue is a
business a buyer will discount hard, and rightly — that risk doesn't disappear at
close, it transfers to them.
4. Are your systems documented, or does your team just "know how it works"?
Undocumented process is invisible until someone tries to run the business without
the person who built it. Diligence is exactly that test, compressed into weeks.
5. Is your valuation expectation based on comparable deals, or on hope?
A number anchored to what similar businesses have actually sold for survives
negotiation. A number anchored to what you feel the business is worth after years
of building it usually doesn't — and the gap between the two is where deals stall
or collapse.
6. Do you have advisory support that isn't the buyer's advisor?
The buyer's team is working for the buyer. Going into diligence and negotiation
without someone in your corner — someone who's seen how these deals actually play
out — is one of the most common and most avoidable mistakes founders make.
None of this is a reason to avoid the conversation when a real offer arrives. It's
a reason to do the readiness work while there's still time to change the answers,
rather than discovering the gaps under deadline pressure with a buyer watching.
