The real question.
Most founders getting ready to sell think the question is, “How much can I get?” The real one – the one that actually keeps you up at night – is quieter. Is my firm worth what I think it is, and what happens to that number if I wait?
The shifting ground isn’t helping. AI is resetting how services firms are valued, and buyers have started asking for their “AI discount” out loud. Valuation is an ice cube; the stove is running hot. The value you spent years building can erode while you decide what to do about it.
Most people advising you on a sale have never been the buyer.
I’ve led buy-side M&A strategy inside two global holding companies – sat in the diligence room and helped decide what a firm like yours was worth, what earned a premium, and what quietly knocked the number down. I know what acquirers reward and what they discount, because I’ve had a say in the rewarding and the discounting.
That’s a useful POV to bring to your firm – before diligence starts, while you can still do something about what it finds.
The Buyer’s-Eye View (BEV) runs four weeks, fixed scope and fixed fee. It scores your firm the way an acquirer would, estimates the gap between what it’s likely worth today and what it could be worth, and hands you a prioritized playbook to close that gap before you sell.
Your business is scored across the six lenses buyers actually price on:
- Revenue quality: How much recurs, how predictable it is, how it’s earned.
- Client portfolio: Concentration, retention, and the risk hiding in your top three.
- Operations and financials: Margin, clean books, whether the place runs without heroics.
- Leadership: Depth beyond the founder, and how much value walks out the door with you.
- Differentiation: Whether you’re one in a million, or one of millions.
- AI: Genuine leverage, or transformation theater eroding your pricing power and valuation.
Those roll into a single weighted score, benchmarked against industry-specific data.
You walk away with the scorecard, an illustrative read on your value gap, and a directional playbook – roughly seven prioritized moves, each tied to why it moves the multiple, on a Now / Next / Later horizon. Delivered in a live, workshop-style readout with your leadership.
Four weeks, start to finish: a kickoff and data request, leadership interviews, data intake, the scorecard, the readout. Defined touchpoints, not open-ended meddling.
The arithmetic makes this easy. A $15M firm at ~$2.5M EBITDA – project-heavy, founder-dependent – might fetch four times earnings, about $10M. The same firm with real recurring revenue, healthy margin, a founder who can step back, and AI that actually works can fetch six or seven: $15–17.5M.
That five-to-seven-million-dollar swing gets made in the twelve to twenty-four months before a sale. A four-week diagnostic to size the gap and map the path pays for itself many times over.
Fixed fee, fixed scope. Half on signing, the balance at readout. Any T&E billed as a pass-through cost. No scope creep, no surprise invoice.
Maybe a sale isn’t on the table just yet. The BEV still earns its keep, because a firm that’s broken through its growth plateau and a firm that’s more valuable to a buyer are the same firm: recurring revenue, healthy margin, a team that doesn’t depend on you for everything. Score it the way a buyer would, and you get a map for getting better – whether or not a sale is imminent.
The playbook tells you what to do. If you’d rather not do it alone, Operate-to-Exit is an embedded engagement to build the value drivers the BEV flagged – shifting the revenue mix toward recurring / retained, expanding margin, de-risking your role, getting the AI leverage right. Milestone-based and time-bound, scoped to key findings from the BEV. Exact shape and terms to be determined once we both know what we’re solving.
Two ways in.
The two-minute version.
The real one.