The preparation for a sale ideally begins two to three years before you actually enter into discussions with a buyer. That is the period in which most value drivers can still be adjusted, whereas in a sale process that is already underway, the room to make adjustments has largely disappeared.
A buyer does not only look at the figures of the current year, but at a trend line. Figures from the past show whether growth and margin have been built up stably or are the result of a favourable year. In a company with 50 to 300 employees, a great deal of operational knowledge often still rests with one or two people, and that kind of pattern cannot be changed in a few months. Adjusting a customer portfolio, building a second management layer or setting up management information are processes that need time to prove themselves in the figures. A buyer who sees two years of figures showing a declining dependency on the owner values that differently than a presentation in which that change has only just been initiated.
At a manufacturing company with 120 employees, for example, it turned out that a large part of the revenue rested with a handful of customers, something that what customer concentration is and why a buyer counts it explains in more detail. Without time to build new customer relationships, this remains a given that a buyer takes into account in pricing. In another case, at a service provider with 80 employees, virtually all decision-making ran through the owner-director. That kind of dependency is signalled by an owner dependency index, and correcting it requires transferring tasks and decisions to a team, something that does not happen in a few weeks. What that process looks like is described at how you become less dependent as an owner.
The point of starting early is not that the outcome of a sale is thereby fixed, but that the bandwidth within which a buyer assesses the company depends less on coincidental weak spots. Eight value drivers weigh in with a buyer, and not every driver requires the same amount of time. Some, such as putting a contract in order or documenting a process, can be arranged in months. Others, such as reducing customer concentration or setting up a decision-making structure without the owner, need a longer lead time to become visible in the figures a buyer sees.
The question "on time for what" is different for every owner, because it depends on how far a company already stands on the eight drivers that buyers weigh. A scan that maps these drivers and owner dependency provides an indicative bandwidth and shows which driver is most sensitive to change. Anyone wanting a first impression in two minutes can take the free test how buyer-ready are you: eight questions that give an indication per driver of where the most room for improvement lies. That is a starting point, not a valuation and not an appraisal.
If a sale is more than a year away, there is time to look driver by driver at what is adjustable; how you make your company sale-ready describes what that sequence looks like in practice. If a sale is on a shorter horizon, the same scan indicates which drivers can still be influenced within that time and which can no longer be. For management information, a comparable process applies: how you professionalise management information shows which steps belong to that and how much time they require.
Owner dependency and the quality of management information are essentially a question of who performs which task and who makes which decision. Which of those tasks are transferable to people in the organisation and which to AI is mapped out by the work scan on ftetoai.com, as a follow-up step once this scan has shown where attention is most urgently needed.