The problem with most exit processes
By the time most owners appoint an advisor, the window to improve valuation has closed.
Due diligence surfaces everything a business hoped would go unnoticed: customer concentration, margin that does not hold at unit level, a management team that depends on the founder, financial reporting that cannot answer a buyer's questions. Each one becomes a discount. Several compounding at once can be the difference between the price you expected and the price you accept.
The businesses that sell well go through their own version of due diligence before the buyer does. They know what will be found. They fix what can be fixed. They have a clean story on the things that cannot.
A buyer will assess your business the way a PE firm would. The question is whether you find the gaps first, or they do.
What buyers actually look at
The scrutiny is consistent regardless of the buyer type.
Whether the buyer is a strategic acquirer, a private equity firm, or a competitor, the assessment covers the same ground. Understanding it in advance is the preparation.
Financial performance
Is the EBITDA real, recurring, and defensible under questioning? What does the margin structure look like at unit level?
Revenue quality
How concentrated is the customer base? How durable is the revenue? What is the business worth if the top two customers reduce or leave?
Commercial position
What is the competitive advantage, and is it structural or personal? What happens to the commercial position when the founder leaves?
Management depth
Does the business run without the founder, or does everything significant route back to one person? That dependency gets priced in.
Operational risk
Where are the single points of failure — people, systems, supplier relationships — that represent concentrated risk?
Financial reporting quality
Can the business answer detailed financial questions quickly and accurately? Buyers who cannot get clean information move slower and bid lower.
How APG prepares you
We run the assessment before the buyer does.
We begin with an independent diagnostic of the business across every dimension a buyer will examine — financially, commercially, operationally, and in the context of the market. The finding tells you precisely what a buyer will find: the value gaps, the risk factors, the questions that will come up in due diligence.
Where gaps exist that can be closed, we build the structure to close them. Pricing that has drifted, customer concentration that can be reduced, management depth that can be developed, financial reporting that can be made buyer-ready. The work is sequenced by what will move valuation most in the time available.
For clients where ongoing involvement adds value, we stay engaged through the preparation period, tracking performance against the baseline established in the assessment and holding the discipline that makes improvement compound rather than stall.
The result is a business that enters a sale process having already done its own due diligence. Fewer surprises. A valuation that holds. A process that moves.
What this looks like in practice
The preparation is where the outcome is determined.
From weekly losses to $6M exit in three years. Assessment identified margin compression, customer concentration risk, and a management team that could not operate without the founder. The work that followed addressed all three. The business entered the sale process clean and sold at the expected valuation.
Financial services business, planned exit in 18 months. Assessment identified four value gaps a buyer would discount. Three were addressed before going to market. The fourth was documented with a clear explanation. Due diligence moved faster because there were no surprises.
The preparation window
When you start determines what is possible.
Two to three years before a planned exit is ideal — enough time to make structural improvements that show up in the historical financials a buyer will scrutinise. Twelve months is workable but constrains what is achievable. Six months or less shifts the focus from genuine improvement to presentation. We are direct about which situation you are in and what it means.
If the timeline is too short for the gaps we find, we say so. The assessment is honest about what is achievable — and what is not.
If performance is below potential, the first step is knowing precisely why.
A Commercial Assessment takes two to four weeks. Fixed fee. At the end, you have a clear picture of what is constraining performance, where the opportunity is, and what should happen first.
Start with a Commercial Assessment →