Exit readiness

A pre-diligence review against a standard buyer request list: normalized EBITDA (or Seller's Discretionary Earnings for smaller deals) with every add-back documented and tied to a transaction, a net working capital baseline and trailing trend, a customer and supplier concentration review, a related-party transaction schedule with market-rate comparisons where relevant, and a check for inconsistent revenue or expense recognition across the years a buyer will look at. The output is a written, prioritized fix list, not a verbal summary, so it can sit in a data room folder alongside the financials it explains.

We start with your last two to three years of financials and the current chart of accounts, walk the standard diligence request list line by line, and flag every item a buyer's team would ask about. Add-backs get built into a schedule with supporting detail, not a single adjusted EBITDA number handed over with no backup. Working capital gets pulled month by month for the trailing period a peg would likely reference. The output goes back to you as a ranked list: fix this before you list, disclose this proactively, this one is minor enough to leave. You decide what gets addressed and on what timeline; we do not run the sale process itself.

Owners planning a sale in the next one to three years, whether to a strategic buyer, a private equity platform, or an internal management buyout. It also fits a business that has already received inbound interest and wants its numbers in order before entertaining a conversation. It is less useful for a business more than three years from any sale decision, since add-back documentation and working capital trends are most valuable when they cover the period a buyer will actually diligence, typically the trailing two to three years before close.

Owner compensation and personal expenses mixed into operating costs with no add-back schedule, so a buyer's team has to reconstruct normalized earnings themselves and discounts the number while they do it. One-time items, a lawsuit settlement, a bad debt write-off, a PPP loan forgiveness entry, sitting inside ordinary operating expense with no flag, understating the recurring earnings the deal is actually priced on. Customer concentration above roughly ten to fifteen percent of revenue with no context or mitigation plan, which buyers treat as a straightforward risk discount. Related-party leases or contracts priced off market rate with no disclosure, discovered mid-diligence instead of addressed up front.

We work from whatever general ledger the business already runs on: QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite or Sage Intacct. Add-back schedules and the working capital trend are built in Excel or Google Sheets so you and any advisor can open, audit and extend the file yourself. For businesses moving into a formal sale process, the finished schedules are formatted to drop directly into a virtual data room such as SecureDocs or Datasite alongside the rest of the diligence package your banker or M&A advisor assembles.

Exit readiness is scoped as a project, priced against how many years of financials need review, how many add-backs and related-party items are involved, and whether prior-period bookkeeping needs a catch-up first. It is not part of a standard monthly bookkeeping tier. Current ranges and how a project like this is scoped are published on the pricing page, and your exact fee is confirmed in writing before work starts.

Twelve to twenty-four months ahead of a planned sale gives enough runway to correct a multi-year trend, retrain owner compensation onto a market-rate structure, or clean up a related-party arrangement before a buyer ever sees it. A shorter runway, six months or less, still returns value: the add-back documentation alone speeds up diligence and reduces the number of open questions a buyer's team brings back after their first pass, even when there is not enough time to fix every underlying pattern.