Not a Numbers Person? Neither Are Most of the Owners We Work With.
NOT KNOWING YOUR NUMBERS DOESN'T MEAN YOU'RE UNPREPARED TO SELL. IT MEANS YOU'RE EXACTLY LIKE MOST BUSINESS OWNERS WE WORK WITH.
Every founder we sit down with is, in some way, the expert. They know their customers by name. They can tell you which client will ask for a change of scope once again, and which employee is quietly holding the whole operation together. They've built a reputation as the person who has the answer, for employees, for customers, for their industry.
Then we ask what their business is worth, and the room changes.
"Honestly, I don't know the numbers side of things." "We're not a numbers-focused industry." "I've never really looked at it that way." We hear some version of this constantly, and it's not a confession of incompetence, it's a signal of how specialized expertise actually works.
Why a Valuation Alone Doesn't Tell You the Full Story
Why a Valuation Alone Doesn't Tell You the Full Story
If you're just beginning to think about selling your business, here's something that might surprise you: you don't need a perfect valuation right now. You don't need a fully certified, buyer ready number before you've even decided whether selling is the right move at all. What you need at this stage is something far more useful, and considerably less expensive: an honest look at where your business actually stands today.
According to the Exit Planning Institute, only 20 to 30 percent of businesses that go to market ever actually sell. Put another way, roughly seven out of ten owners who list their business walk away without a deal, not because their business wasn't valuable, but because it wasn't ready. The gap between a business that has value and a business a buyer will actually pay full price for is rarely about the number on a valuation report. It's about everything that number doesn't show.
Closing that gap takes time. In our experience, and consistent with the broader guidance across the M&A advisory field, that's roughly 18 months of deliberate work, not 18 days of paperwork. The good news is that 18 months is enough time to fix nearly everything on this list, if you know what to look for and start early enough to actually address it rather than just disclose it.