Selling Your Company
When Someone Wants to Buy You, Be Ready That Week
A buyer's first request list answered with a folder, not a project — because every week a buyer spends checking whether your numbers are real is a week of leverage you do not get back.
Who This Is For
The usual reasons: a sale process on the horizon, or a buyer already asking.
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What you receive
What It Includes
These are the standard services, grouped under the objective they serve rather than sold as a menu.
- An exit-readiness review: what a buyer's diligence team will ask for, what is missing, and what it would take — in writing, early enough to fix it.
- The diligence package: statements, trial balance, ledger detail, agings, reconciliations, fixed assets, the journal listing and the evidence behind them, built once and kept current.
- Your own quality-of-earnings analysis, prepared before the buyer's: trailing-twelve-month earnings normalized for one-time items, a net-debt bridge, working capital, customer concentration and related parties.
- Data-room preparation, with each document filed under the question it answers.
- Deal Support while the process runs: the request list answered, the second list after the first, and the March numbers again in June.
Selling Your Company — what you receive
Who owns the work
Review, With You, or For You
The same three postures apply to every category. What separates them is who owns the work: all yours at Review, shared at With You, all ours at For You. The final sign-off is your management’s on all three.
- Review
- All yours — the Gap Review…Review · Selling Your CompanyAll yours — the Gap Review: we look, we write down what a buyer will find, and we prepare nothing.
- With You
- Shared — we build the diligence package and run the request list…With You · Selling Your CompanyShared — we build the diligence package and run the request list; your team fetches what we ask for and approves what goes out.
- For You
- All ours — we build it, fetch it, and answer the buyer's analysts directly as their point of contact…For You · Selling Your CompanyAll ours — we build it, fetch it, and answer the buyer's analysts directly as their point of contact; what reaches the buyer is what your management has signed off.
What goes into Selling Your Company, and who does it at each posture
| The work | Review | With You | For You |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write down what a buyer's diligence team will ask for, what is missing, and what it would take | Us | Us | Us |
| Build the diligence package and keep it current: statements, trial balance, ledger detail, agings, reconciliations, fixed assets, the journal listing | You | Us | Us |
| Prepare your own quality-of-earnings analysis: trailing-twelve-month earnings, the net-debt bridge, working capital, customer concentration, related parties | You | Us | Us |
| Fetch the evidence and the documents | You | You | Us |
| File each document in the data room under the question it answers | You | Us | Us |
| Answer the request list while the process runs, and the second list after the first | You | Us | Us |
| Speak to the buyer's analysts | You | You | Us, as their point of contact |
| Approve what goes out; what reaches the buyer is what your management has signed off | You | You | You |
The final sign-off is your management’s on every posture; we never sign off on the books or on any engagement.
The boundary
What This Does Not Cover
We do not value your company, and the buyer's quality-of-earnings work belongs to the buyer's own advisers — the analysis we prepare is yours, before they start. What we remove is the part of a sale that destroys value for no reason: the weeks spent proving that the books are right.
What It Runs On
We do this work on Automate Accounting, which has its own page for the same objective. That page says what the software does; this one says what we do with it.
What you hold first
Before You Sign Anything
Three things you have in hand before anything is signed: the first from this site, the other two from the engagement letter.
Your Own Estimate
Before you write to us
A Written Scope and Price
Before we start
An Exit Named in Advance
Before we start
The first conversation is a look at your books and an honest answer about whether we are the right firm for this.