How to Prepare a Business for Sale: A Practical, Honest Overview

Most "how to sell your business" content either lists generic advice or jumps straight to hiring a broker. The real preparation work sits in between — things you do yourself, before you're paying anyone, that materially change how the eventual sale goes.

Start with your numbers, not your story

Before anything else, get a real normalised EBITDA — your actual profitability once you strip out expenses specific to how you personally run the business. Most owners have never calculated this properly, and it's the single number every subsequent conversation will reference.

Then assess readiness honestly

Score yourself across the areas that actually determine sale outcomes — customer concentration, owner dependency, documentation, recurring revenue. Fix what you can now; you have more time and leverage to fix it today than you will in the middle of a live process.

Model a realistic valuation range

Not a single number — a range, using multiple valuation multiples, so you understand your own sensitivity to buyer assumptions before you're negotiating against one.

Then, and only then, engage professionals

Once you have real numbers, an honest readiness picture, and a realistic range, your first conversation with an accountant, broker, or M&A adviser is dramatically more productive — and, in practice, often shorter and cheaper, because you're not paying them to do the organisational work you could have done yourself.

The Business Sale Readiness & Valuation Toolkit does exactly the first three steps in one real, computed workbook.