A defensible institutional read on how prepared your business is to withstand a transaction process — across the seven dimensions that determine sale execution quality.
Acquirers and their Quality of Earnings providers examine seven dimensions when pricing a business. The defensibility of each dimension determines whether the transaction holds at LOI value or is repriced through diligence. Observed across institutional deal flow, the majority of lower middle market sale processes experience post-LOI repricing — and the overwhelming share of those repricing events trace to readiness gaps that were measurable well before the process began. This instrument reads your business through the same seven dimensions, calibrated to TEOL Capital's proprietary frameworks — the Financial Truth Ladder, the Reporting Under Scrutiny Model, the Cash Visibility Maturity Model, the Founder Dependency Index, the HoldCo Finance Architecture, and the Capital Readiness Scorecard.
The Sale Readiness Index is TEOL Capital's flagship pre-transaction diagnostic — a structured twenty-one-question read across the seven dimensions that determine how a business performs through a sale process. It consolidates exit readiness, transaction readiness, and sale readiness into a single institutional instrument. It is not a survey and not a marketing quiz; it is the same sequence of questions a sophisticated sell-side advisor would walk through with you across a discovery conversation, structured so you can answer them at your own pace and read the institutional context for each answer as you go.
The seven dimensions, the twenty-one questions, the answer options, the scoring weights, and the institutional commentary between questions reflect the accumulated practitioner work of TEOL Capital's principals and alliance network across lower middle market operating businesses. The calibration draws on the institutional examination patterns observed across the combined experience of TEOL Capital's principals and partners in direct deal work, the published transactional research from PitchBook, Mergermarket, BVR, GF Data, and sector-specific institutional sources, and the structural patterns defined by TEOL Capital's proprietary frameworks.
The twenty-one questions are organized into seven sections, each addressing one dimension of sale readiness and most anchored on one of TEOL's proprietary frameworks. Before each section, you will see a brief explanation of what the next three questions test and why the dimension matters to acquirers, their advisors, and their lenders. After each question, you will see institutional commentary on what your specific answer indicates — what most sellers look like at that position, how acquirers or QofE providers typically read it, and what the path forward looks like.
At the end you receive a composite Sale Readiness score from 0 to 100, a placement on one of four readiness bands (Not Yet Process-Ready, Conditionally Ready, Process-Ready, Institutionally Process-Ready), individual scores across all seven dimensions, a seven-axis radar against the institutional benchmark, identification of the two priority remediation areas where the highest-leverage work sits, counterparty reads across acquirers, QofE providers, investment bankers, and lenders, and a set of recommended actions with timelines and quantified impact.
This instrument is not a substitute for a full sale-readiness engagement. It is a directional read — useful in its own right and useful as the starting point for a deeper conversation when a process is in view. It is not anonymous: it captures your contact information at the start, holds your responses under formal confidentiality, and serves as TEOL's institutional introduction to your business. You will not be enrolled in high-frequency drip sequences. Full data handling: see Tools page.
The instrument takes twenty to twenty-five minutes to complete carefully. There is no time pressure. You can move back to any previous question, take a break and return, or stop and start.
The Sale Readiness Index applies a seven-dimension framework measuring pre-transaction readiness across the dimensions acquirers examine in middle-market sale processes.
Financial Readiness measures EBITDA defensibility through quality of earnings examination, anchored to the Financial Truth Ladder.
Reporting and Information Readiness measures the institutional quality of management reporting infrastructure supporting buyer diligence, anchored to the Reporting Under Scrutiny Model.
Working Capital and Cash Readiness measures the documentation supporting working capital peg negotiation and the maturity of forward cash visibility.
Operator Concentration Readiness measures founder dependency across the six axes of the Founder Dependency Index and the documented evidence of distributed institutional discipline.
Structural Readiness measures entity structure integrity, contract transferability, intellectual property ownership, and intercompany discipline.
Commercial Readiness measures documented revenue durability including customer concentration analysis, cohort retention, contract structure, and growth durability evidence.
Process Readiness measures the institutional capacity to run a sale process including data room quality, advisor coordination, narrative coherence, and management presentation defensibility.
Each dimension scored 0 to 100 based on responses to three questions per dimension (21 questions total). Composite score maps to band placement: Not Yet Process-Ready (0–25), Conditionally Ready (26–50), Process-Ready (51–75), Institutionally Process-Ready (76–100).
The composite band predicts post-LOI repricing exposure. Institutionally Process-Ready operators experience 0 to 5 percent post-LOI repricing on average. Not Yet Process-Ready operators experience 15 to 28 percent. Dimension-level flags identify the highest-leverage remediation priorities with quantified value preservation impact and remediation timeline.
Calibrated to observed sale processes across $20 to $100M revenue businesses in the past 36 months.