Twenty-one questions on how your business would hold up if you sold it.
When a business goes to market, the price agreed at the letter of intent is not usually the price paid. It moves during diligence, and it almost always moves down. What moves it is not the quality of the business. It is the gaps a buyer finds in how the business is documented, and those gaps are measurable long before a process starts.
This walks the seven areas buyers examine. You answer, you see how a buyer or their accountant reads that answer, and at the end you get a score, the two areas where the highest-leverage work sits, and what closing them involves.
You do not need to have sold a business before. If a term is unfamiliar, the tool explains it as you go.
It is not anonymous. Your responses are handled under our Privacy Policy. If the read surfaces something worth a conversation, someone from TEOL may follow up. If you choose not to engage, you may receive occasional insights from TEOL. Every message includes a one-click unsubscribe.
Fifteen to twenty minutes. You can go back at any point.
Before you begin
Because the letter of intent is agreed on your numbers and the closing price is agreed on what diligence found. Most of the movement traces to gaps in how the business is documented rather than problems with the business, and those gaps are measurable long before a process starts.
Most of the useful work takes six to eighteen months depending on where you start. The things that take longest are getting a clean run of monthly reporting, reducing what depends on you personally, and documenting contracts, so starting late limits what you can fix.
It is the organised set of documents a buyer works through: financial statements, management accounts, contracts, employment records, leases, insurance, litigation history and corporate records. The test is not whether you have them but whether someone else could find them without you.
An earn-out is part of the price paid later, and only if the business hits agreed targets after the sale. Buyers propose them when they are uncertain about something they could not resolve in diligence. The better your documentation, the less uncertainty there is to price, and the smaller the earn-out tends to be.
Because they are paying a multiple of it. A buyer's accountant reconstructs earnings from source records to test whether your reported figure is what the business actually produces. If your adjustments are documented, the exercise tends to confirm your number. If they are not, it tends to rebuild it on their assumptions.
That is exactly what a buyer is trying to work out. If your largest customers deal with you personally rather than with someone at the business, a buyer prices the risk that they leave when you do. Introducing a second relationship holder well before a process is one of the cheapest things you can do.
It is worth considering if you expect scrutiny. Commissioning your own means you find the adjustments first and decide how to present them, rather than seeing them for the first time in a buyer's report during negotiation.
A few of the questions and inputs you will see. Your answers and results stay in the diagnostic.
Use the Sale Readiness Index to make a directional read of your business. This is not a lender quote, valuation opinion or commissioned diligence report.
Provide your details and work through 21 questions across seven areas. Allow about 20 minutes; your pace may vary.
Choose the answer that describes your current position. The commentary explains how a buyer could read your answers in the section summaries and final read.
Read readiness scores. The output is indicative, not a formal quote or verified diligence opinion.
Review the recommended actions where gaps qualify. If no areas need remediation, maintain the evidence and revisit the read when your circumstances change.
Choose the next question you want to examine:
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 and dimension scores identify where your preparation may be challenged in diligence. No score can predict the price a buyer will offer or how it will change after a letter of intent. Where a gap qualifies, the read provides specific steps to work on it.
The read is based on your self-reported answers. Have your advisers test the supporting records before beginning a sale process.
Sector multiples, adjustment ranges and stress factors in this tool are TEOL's illustrative calibrations, based on general market observation and TEOL's frameworks. They are not drawn from a single dataset and do not predict any specific outcome.