How to See Your Business Through a Buyer’s Eyes
The eight things a buyer inspects, what each one does to your price, and how to fix them long before the buyer’s team starts picking through your books and asking difficult questions.
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What you’ll walk away knowing
- The 8 things a buyer inspects
- What each one does to your price
- What “ready to sell” really means
- The fixes to make first
A buyer is not buying your revenue.
He is buying the cashflow that keeps coming after you hand over the keys. Every item in this guide is one version of the same question — how much of this works without you?
And the part most owners miss: the work that makes your business worth more to a buyer is the same work that makes it easier to run today. Start early and it pays you twice.
businesses that go to market never sell. The ones that do got ready early.Per longstanding IBBA (International Business Brokers Association) data.
The eight areas inside
This isn’t a teaser. It’s the actual order a buyer works in, written by operators who’ve sat on both sides of the table. One unaddressed deal-killer and the rest of your score stops mattering; he goes quiet and moves to the next deal. So you fix the deal-killers first, then the things that set your price.
Deal-killers
No sale until these are fixed
- 01The financials
- 02Diligence readiness
- 03Risk factors
What sets the price
These move you up or down the range
- 04How much of the business is you
- 05The quality of your revenue
- 06Operations and systems
Protecting the deal
What holds after you sign
- 07People and retention
- 08Planning for the offer
From the founder
I’ve spent my career on both sides of this table — as an acquirer buying businesses and as the advisor preparing owners to sell, with more than $250 million in deal value behind me. I wrote this because I’ve watched good owners leave real money on the table over problems they never saw coming — and nearly every one was fixable with enough runway.
— Daniel Sweet, Founder
SweetSpot Business Advisors · Operators, not brokers — we don’t list your business, we make it ready.
A few quick questions
Is it really free?
Yes. It’s a free PDF you download — no payment, no card, nothing to buy. We wrote it to be useful whether or not we ever work together.
How long is it?
A 20-page PDF covering the eight areas a buyer inspects — for each, how it’s tested, what it does to your price, what “ready” looks like, and what to do now.