Preparing For Sale Playbook

Description

Most sale prices are decided long before a buyer is in the room.

By the time a buyer’s advisers start asking questions, the answers are already fixed. Financials that were never built to be examined get examined. A working capital position nobody documented becomes a negotiating lever for the other side. Systems that only one person understands become a risk the buyer prices in. None of that is fixable in the middle of a process — but all of it is fixable twelve to eighteen months out.

What you’ll have at the end of eight weeks

Due-diligence-ready financials, a working capital position that reads as financial discipline rather than an open question, and documented stack and systems. Not “improved” or “tidied up” — specific artefacts, finished, in a state where handing them to a buyer’s adviser is a straightforward act rather than a fortnight of scrambling.

How it works

Eight weeks, sequenced. The Playbook opens with scope, so you know exactly what’s covered and what isn’t. Then a diagnostic, so you start from where your business actually is rather than from where a generic guide assumes it is. The main chapters carry the decisions and the work. Tooling gives you the working templates. It closes with a synthesis and exit section, plus the operating rhythm that keeps the position current between now and the moment a buyer appears.

UK and US treatment run side by side throughout, with the divergences flagged where they matter rather than averaged into something that fits neither.

What’s included

Roughly 44 pages. One-time purchase — yours to keep, revisit, and work through at whatever pace the timeline demands.

Who it’s for

Founders and finance leads with a sale on a real horizon — twelve to eighteen months out, not a vague someday. Also useful earlier: much of the work makes the business better run whether or not you sell.

What it doesn’t do

It doesn’t replace your corporate solicitor, your accountant, or a transaction adviser. It makes their work faster and cheaper by getting the business into a state where their time goes on the deal instead of on cleanup.