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If you're planning to sell your business in the next few years, the time to begin preparing is now. Owners who start well before a deal is on the table are best positioned for strong outcomes. Early preparation creates options, leverage, and greater control over the process.
The most successful deals are rarely won at the negotiating table; they’re shaped in the months and years of preparation that come before it.
This guide outlines strategic, financial, and operational steps owners and executives can take to build momentum, enhance valuation, and present a compelling narrative to buyers.
A successful transaction begins well before the sale process itself, with intentional preparation, strategic alignment, and a clear understanding of what drives value in your business.
For many owners, the decision to sell doesn’t happen overnight. It often begins as a distant idea to be considered “someday”, lingering in the background until it becomes a priority. While it’s easy to assume you’ll be ready when the time comes, transaction readiness requires thoughtful planning and a shift in mindset.
The following moves provide a practical starting point.
Understanding why you want to sell is the foundation of a successful transaction. Are you preparing for retirement, pursuing generational wealth transfer, or seeking institutional capital to scale? Do you intend to remain involved in the business?
A clear and credible rationale shapes the narrative buyers will evaluate. Transactions often stall when intentions are vague or misaligned. By defining your motivation early, you can attract the right type of buyer and increase the likelihood of a smooth process.
As you begin considering a potential sale, whether it’s a few years away or part of a shorter-term plan, it’s important to take a broader view of how your business creates and sustains value. Before diving into the financial detail, step back and consider the story your business tells. It should be credible, well supported, and strategically aligned with where you are headed.
Buyers want evidence of sustained profitability, resilience, and scalability. Support such as audited financial statements, quality of earnings (QoE) reports, and consistent reporting strengthens that story.
Consider how your business has evolved, how it responds to challenges, and what differentiates it in the marketplace. What decisions have guided its growth? How have you navigated change? These reflections help articulate a clear and persuasive narrative.
A well-developed financial narrative lays the groundwork for more confident conversations around valuation, growth strategy, and deal structure.
A strong leadership team is one of the most valuable assets in any transaction.
Highlight their track record, strategic capabilities, and readiness to lead. Can they continue growing the business? Can they expand service lines, manage disruption, and execute strategic initiatives?
A vision presented in a slide deck carries little weight if leadership lacks experience or credibility to deliver on it. Buyers invest in people as much as they invest in financial performance.
As your business moves toward transaction readiness, the ability to produce timely, accurate, and insightful reporting becomes a meaningful differentiator.
Sophisticated buyers rely on data to assess performance, validate growth potential, and identify risk. If reporting systems are outdated or overly manual, now is the time to invest in improvements. Because system transitions require time and refinement, they should be well underway before due diligence begins.
Align financial reporting with key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your value drivers and strategic priorities, such as customer retention, margin trends, recurring revenue, or operational efficiency. When thoughtfully selected and consistently tracked, KPIs become a powerful tool for internal decision-making and external credibility.
An established reporting infrastructure streamlines due diligence, signals strong operational discipline and transparency, and positions you to address buyer questions proactively.
Transaction readiness is as much about mindset as it is about process.
Adopting a value-creation lens means thinking like an executive preparing the business for its next stage of ownership. Document wins, make decisions that enhance profitability, and maintain momentum.
Most buyers scrutinize the last two or three years of performance and momentum. They’re more focused on recent trajectory and future outlook than on distant accomplishments. When an owner relies too heavily on past successes, it can come across like a former athlete reminiscing about their prime. Demonstrating continued growth, adaptability, and market awareness reinforces that the business remains dynamic and future-focused.
Every business has a handful of drivers that meaningfully influence value. These may include pricing power, customer retention, proprietary processes, or differentiated distribution channels.
Rather than pursue every opportunity, focus on the few initiatives that produce outsized impact. A trusted advisor can provide objective insight into which levers align best with your strategic goals and transaction timeline.
Concentrated effort on high-impact drivers sharpens your positioning and increases the attractiveness of your business to buyers who are looking for scalable, differentiated businesses.
Selling your business is a significant and complex undertaking. Surround yourself with experienced professionals across investment banking, valuation, legal, accounting, and strategy. Engaging the right advisors early can help you navigate obstacles, focus your resources, and position the business to achieve an optimal outcome.
As Keith Ferry, Managing Director at Elliott Davis, explains, “The best way to educate yourself on what makes your company appealing to a buyer is to surround yourself with great advisors.”
Transactions can strain operations and create fatigue. A strong, coordinated advisory team helps you navigate challenges, prioritize decisions, and reduce the burden on you and your management team. Buyers look for well-prepared, professionally managed companies, and a capable advisory team signals that you’re serious, organized, and deal-ready.
Your financial infrastructure underpins the entire transaction process. Timely, accurate reporting backed by reliable systems and forward-looking insights allows buyers to understand performance and assess value with confidence.
Rather than waiting for the “right buyer,” focus on building a business buyers are eager to pursue. At some point, most businesses raise equity or debt. If reporting, insights, and strategy are not dialed in, value erodes and deals stall. Start with these four strategies to maximize value rather than blend in.
Credible reporting begins with a solid accounting foundation.
Buyers and lenders depend on accurate, timely, and well-organized data to evaluate performance and risk. That starts with accrual accounting, which offers a clearer view of financial health by recognizing revenue and expenses when earned. If your business operates on a cash basis, transitioning well in advance of a transaction can improve clarity and credibility.
With the fundamentals established, focus on elevating your accounting operations:
When properly designed, the financial reporting framework becomes a strategic asset, fueling growth, managing risk, and showing your competitive advantage. Buyers want to see not just where you’ve been, but where you’re headed and how you plan to get there.
Transform raw data into decision-ready insights:
A strategic roadmap is your flight plan: competent pilots, a clear route, and a shared destination. It connects the overarching strategy to daily execution, turning high-level goals into measurable actions and aligning teams around a shared vision.
Defining key milestones and timelines allows you to set measurable growth targets and the initiatives that support them. When those initiatives are tied to specific KPIs, you can track performance, adjust quickly, and communicate results with confidence.
A strong roadmap makes the vision tangible and the strategy credible. Backed by actionable plans and integrated with the operating model, your projections become more reliable and your growth more durable.
Entering a sale unprepared exposes gaps in your story and undermines buyer confidence. To avoid this, begin positioning your business well before formal due diligence. Use the pre-diligence period to package and position the business as an investable asset. Your goal is to present a high-value, low-risk platform for growth.
Package your financials and operating insights into a cohesive narrative that highlights strengths, growth levers, and competitive advantages. A well-told story, anchored in reliable data, builds trust with buyers and supports a stronger valuation.
Be ready for QoE scrutiny with clean, accurate, and well-organized data. Buyers will examine earnings to validate profitability and durability. Anticipate likely concerns and prepare thoughtful, evidence-based responses. Addressing potential objections upfront shows maturity and transparency, reduces negotiation friction, and can accelerate the deal timeline.
Operational readiness increases buyer appeal by demonstrating that your business can scale, withstand pressure, and transition smoothly to new ownership. This section outlines practical actions to lift valuation, reduce execution risk, and accelerate post-transaction performance.
Buyers, especially private equity firms, seek profitable businesses that are also scalable, agile, and well-run. Operational strength signals post close durability and growth capacity. Here’s how to get there:
A resilient supply chain is a key indicator of operational maturity. Start by diversifying your sourcing strategy to reduce reliance on single vendors and address customer concentration risk. Broader relationships protect future earnings and enhance the appeal to buyers and lenders, which can ultimately support higher valuations.
Prepare contingency plans to address potential tariffs, geopolitical shifts, and unexpected supply chain disruptions. Scenario planning adds strategic agility and helps protect margins under pressure. To further strengthen your position, implement cost containment strategies and invest in systems that enable real-time visibility and adaptability. Buyers want to see that your supply chain can scale and respond quickly, rather than buckle under stress.
A strong tech foundation supports transaction readiness from the inside out, driving operational efficiency. Align your operational KPIs with financial reporting to produce clear, consistent performance insights. Integrated systems enable data-driven decisions and provide cross-functional visibility, making growth goals more measurable and attainable.
Upgrading your tech stack with a clean, connected infrastructure promotes scalability and simplifies post-close integration. Equally important is maintaining operational documentation, including clear records of systems, processes, and performance metrics. This helps buyers quickly understand how your business functions and reduces friction during diligence and integration. For buyers, a well-organized operating environment reflects business maturity.
Buyers invest in growth stories. Start by identifying your most profitable products and services. Keep offerings flexible so you can pivot with market demand, and provide visibility, highlighting upcoming launches or commercial initiatives (new products, pricing strategies, or marketing plans), alongside profitability by product or segment.
A well-told, data-backed narrative can inspire buyer interest and support a stronger valuation. Be ready to articulate where the business is headed and why it stands out. Demonstrate market diligence: use external data to validate the size and accessibility of your target market and show how your solution is positioned to capture it.
Your story should be crisp and confident, like a Shark Tank presentation, and focused on future growth. The more clearly you link your strategy to real-world opportunity, the closer you are to doing a deal on your terms.
People are among your most valuable assets. Identify the high-impact, hard-to-replace roles that drive daily operations and put a retention strategy in place. Align compensation with contribution and consider tools such as pay-to-stay agreements, deferred cash incentives, or change-in-control bonuses for key employees. You’ll need a management team capable of guiding the organization through the transition.
Buyers want confidence that your team will remain post-close. A unified, committed leadership team reduces transition risk and builds buyer trust. Plan from a buyer’s perspective by ensuring succession coverage, clear retention plans, and organizational clarity to position your company for continuity and ongoing success.
Buyers value transparency and seek confidence in the plan. Anticipate likely diligence questions around product and customer concentration, market cycles, and downside risks, and prepare thoughtful, evidence-based responses. Develop driver-based forecasting models that include base, upside, and downside scenarios, each supported by documented contingency plans with clear triggers and owners.
Demonstrate how your business performs under varying conditions, including effects on revenue, margins, cash flow, working capital, and debt covenants. The ability to defend your narrative with rigorous analysis and strategic foresight signals maturity and reinforces your value proposition.
Build today for the transaction you want tomorrow.
We help owners get investor ready by strengthening strategy, financial infrastructure, and operations well before you go to market. When your story is clear, your data is credible, and your execution is disciplined, buyers see a business that is high value and low risk.
Whether you are a few years out or evaluating options now, starting early creates leverage, protects value, and accelerates success.
Ready to begin? Contact Elliott Davis to start building your transaction readiness plan today.
The information provided in this communication is of a general nature and should not be considered professional advice. You should not act upon the information provided without obtaining specific professional advice. The information above is subject to change.
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