Getting ready
Most businesses we look at are worth meaningfully more in eighteen months than they are today, and the difference is not growth. It is that the value already inside the business is not visible to anyone underwriting it.
Three things, in this order
- Document the recurring base. Which work is contracted, at what frequency, at what price, renewing at what rate. Businesses that can answer that in a spreadsheet get credit for it. Those that cannot get paid for one-off work instead, which is worth considerably less.
- Measure the concentration. Work out what your top handful of customers represent as a share of revenue. If the number is uncomfortable, that is a reason to start now rather than a reason to avoid looking — it takes time to fix and no time at all for a buyer to find.
- Become findable. Covered below. Usually the cheapest of the three and reliably the most neglected.
On being findable
This is the pattern across every trade we have measured, not a claim about one of them. In fire and life safety — the market we have mapped most thoroughly — fewer than a third of independent Gulf Coast firms had a website that could be found and verified as theirs, and among those that did, the median search authority was effectively zero.
Two consequences. You lose inbound work you never learn about, to competitors who are not better than you and are simply easier to find. And a buyer looking at a business whose customers all arrived by word of mouth from one owner sees key-person risk, and prices it in.
This is unusually fixable. In a trade where the median competitor is invisible, being merely present is a durable advantage — not because search is clever, but because almost nobody in these industries has bothered.
How we measure that →How the work runs
Defined scope, fixed fee, on the specific gaps we find in your business — not a retainer and not an open-ended engagement. Most of it is work your own people can carry once someone has said what to do and in what order.
If you later sell through us, that is a separate conversation with a separate agreement. We will tell you plainly if we think the readiness work is not worth doing, which happens — some businesses should simply go to market as they are.
When this is the wrong service
- You want to sell this quarter. There is no time for any of it to show up in the numbers.
- You have no intention of ever selling and the business runs fine. Then this is discretionary marketing spend, and you should treat it as such.
- Someone has already made a serious offer. Talk about the offer first.