NINE QUESTIONS · FOUR MINUTES · NOTHING STORED

Would your business survive diligence?

Most owners find out what shape their business is in after they've signed a letter of intent, when a buyer's accountants start asking for things nobody has ever had to produce. That's the expensive way to learn it.

These are nine of the questions that decide how a sale goes. Answer them honestly and you'll get a straight read on where you stand — including, if it applies, that you shouldn't be selling yet.

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This assessment provides general business-sale information only. It does not establish a professional engagement, estimate what any business is worth, or substitute for advice from your tax and accounting professionals. Your answers are not stored or transmitted.

What "ready" actually means

Readiness isn't the same thing as wanting to sell, and it isn't the same thing as having a good business. Plenty of excellent companies get repriced in diligence, and it's almost never because the business was bad. It's because the record of the business couldn't keep up with it.

A buyer is underwriting risk. Every question above is a place where risk either sits with them or gets handed back to you — in the price, in an earnout, in a longer transition period, or in a holdback. The owners who do well are the ones who found those places first and closed them before anybody else went looking.

The other half of readiness has nothing to do with the books. Selling a company you built is a bigger change than most owners expect, and the ones who regret it usually aren't the ones who left money on the table. It's worth being honest with yourself about that before the process starts, because once it does, momentum is real and it points one direction.

What happens next

If the assessment turned up work to do, most of it belongs to your CPA and your own team. Where a second opinion helps is in the sequence — knowing what has to be finished before anything else matters, and what can be handled while a process is already running.

If you want to see how a sale actually unfolds, The Sale walks through it stage by stage. Valuation covers how buyers in these industries put a number on a business. And How I'm Paid explains why I charge for time rather than a percentage of the outcome — which is the reason I can tell you the answer is "not yet" without it costing me anything.