Almost everything that materially raises what a buyer will pay takes two or three years. Almost everything owners do in the final six months does not.
Start a private conversation with the Acquisition Concierge, already scoped to exit readiness. Pick a starting point, or describe your situation directly.
Buyers pay for earnings that will still be there once you are not, and discount everything that suggests they might not be. That single sentence explains most of what preparation consists of. Reducing dependence on the owner, spreading revenue across more customers, building a management layer that can run the business, moving revenue toward the recurring and contracted, and producing financial reporting an outsider can rely on all address the same underlying question. They also all take years, which is the awkward part: an owner who decides to sell and starts preparing has already forfeited most of the available gain. What can be done in the final months is narrower, assembling documentation, resolving obvious issues, and understanding your own numbers well enough to defend them under diligence.
Roughly in order of effect. Note how much of it is about people and durability rather than about profit.
Transferring relationships, decisions and knowledge to the business. The largest single lever and the slowest.
A team that runs the company without you, which buyers value both for continuity and because it reduces their own bandwidth problem.
Spreading revenue across more customers, and moving key relationships off any one person.
Contracted or recurring revenue supports a higher multiple than project work, because it is more likely to persist.
Reviewed or audited statements, personal expenses separated out, and reporting that survives a quality-of-earnings review.
Contracts documented, intellectual property properly owned, litigation resolved, employment classifications correct, leases in order.
How preparation is sequenced.
Preparation affects both the multiple and whether the business is straightforwardly saleable at all.
Buyers look at two to three years of history. A change made this year is visible but unproven; a change made three years ago is a trend. That single fact is the strongest argument for starting long before you intend to transact.
A review or audit helps, though for most lower-middle-market businesses what matters more is that the numbers survive a buyer's quality-of-earnings review. That means personal expenses identified and separated, revenue recognized consistently, working capital behaving normally, and the ability to explain any unusual item. Some owners commission a sell-side quality-of-earnings report, which surfaces problems while you can still fix them and speeds the eventual process. It is genuinely useful, and it is not a substitute for the buyer doing their own.
Partly by growing the rest of the business, which is slow but real, and partly by changing the nature of the dependence, which is faster. A concentrated customer on a long contract, served by a team rather than by you personally, with documented terms and several relationships on both sides, is a materially smaller discount than the same revenue resting on a personal relationship and a handshake. Where the concentration cannot be reduced in time, expect it to be addressed in the structure, through an earnout or escrow, rather than ignored.
Anything that makes the numbers harder to trust or the business more dependent on you. Deferring maintenance or investment to flatter short-term earnings is transparent to any competent quality-of-earnings review and damages credibility beyond the specific item. So does unusual working-capital management in the final year, which is one of the first things examined. The general principle is that buyers discount what they cannot verify, so a period of boringly consistent, well-documented performance is worth more than an optimised one.
It depends on how quickly the investment shows up in results. Spending that depresses current earnings and produces returns after you have gone is usually paid for by you and enjoyed by the buyer. Investment that produces demonstrable results within the two-to-three-year window buyers examine can pay for itself several times over through the multiple. The genuinely valuable pre-sale investments are frequently not growth at all: a second layer of management, better reporting, and documented processes all raise value more reliably than a new product line begun eighteen months out.
Describe your business and your rough timeline. The Concierge will help you work out what to start now.