Every business owner has a number in their head for what the business is worth. Usually it's some multiple of revenue, or a figure a friend in a similar industry mentioned once at dinner. Then an actual buyer shows up, and the number they offer is lower — sometimes a lot lower — and the owner walks away confused about what happened.
What happened is that revenue was never the thing being priced. A buyer isn't paying for what the business made last year. They're paying for what it will keep making after the current owner is gone, with none of the relationships, habits, or tribal knowledge that made the old version work. That's a different business, and it's the only one they're actually buying.
In practice, that comes down to three things. Get all three right and the number goes up. Get one wrong and it doesn't matter how good the other two look — the buyer will price the business as if the weak one is the whole story.
What buyers are actually pricing
Whether it runs without you.
If every big client wants you on the call, every price exception needs your sign-off, and every crew leader still texts you before making a decision, the buyer isn't acquiring a business — they're acquiring a job. That gets priced accordingly, and it's the single fastest way to shrink an offer.
Whether the numbers hold up under a real look.
A monthly revenue total from QuickBooks isn't diligence-ready. Buyers want to know which jobs, clients, or service lines actually made money once every cost is counted against them — and if you can't answer that at the job level, they'll assume the worst and price around the uncertainty.
Whether the revenue repeats, or was just won.
A great year built on a few one-off wins and personal relationships doesn't transfer. A buyer is looking for a pattern that keeps happening on its own — repeat clients, contracts, referral systems — because that's the part of the business they can actually count on after the sale.
None of these three show up on a P&L. They show up in how the business is built, months or years before anyone starts shopping it around. That's why exit readiness isn't something you do in the six months before a sale — it's a byproduct of running the business well the whole time.
This is the work underneath the Strategy side of what I do: building the growth roadmap, the clean numbers, and the systems that make a business worth more — whether the plan is to sell it, scale it, or just stop being the bottleneck. If you're not sure where your business would land on these three, that's a fair place to start a conversation.