Exit Readiness Planner
An honest read of what a buyer or a successor would find in your business today, the eight things that move the price most, and a twelve-month plan to fix them before anyone looks
The problem
A lot of Canadian owners plan to sell or hand over their business in the next decade, and most of them have never looked at it the way a buyer would. A buyer sees a business that stops when the owner takes a week off, a customer list where one account is 40 percent of revenue, books that need "adjustments" to show the real profit, a lease with eighteen months left and no assignment clause, and a crew whose knowledge lives in their heads. Each of those costs money at the table, and each takes a year or two to fix. The broker and the accountant come in at the end. The work that changes the price happens now. This skill is the buyer's walk-through, three years early.
The tool
Once installed, this skill interviews you the way a careful buyer's advisor would, without the pressure. It asks about owner dependence (what breaks if you're away for 30 days), customer concentration, recurring versus one-off revenue, the state of the books and who prepares them, documented processes, key staff and what keeps them, the lease and whether it can be assigned, the equipment and its age, the contracts and whether they transfer, and the licences that are in your name rather than the company's. It scores each area as a buyer would, in plain terms, and ranks the eight fixes by how much they tend to move a price and how long they take.
Then it writes the twelve-month plan: the owner-dependence test first (delegate, document, take the thirty days), the concentration fix (the second and third customers to grow), the books (what to ask your accountant to clean up, and why normalized earnings matter), the lease conversation, the key-staff conversation, and the data room list so that when a buyer does ask, the folder exists. It won't value the business and it won't pretend to be your accountant, lawyer or broker; it tells you which of those to call and when. The processes it says you're missing get written in the SOP Studio, and the knowledge in your crew's heads gets captured with the Handover Doc Builder.
What's inside
- A buyer's-eye interview across the ten areas that decide a small business sale
- A readiness read per area, in plain words, with the question a buyer would ask
- The eight fixes ranked by price impact and time to fix
- A twelve-month plan with quarterly milestones, starting with the thirty-day owner-absence test
- The data room checklist: the documents a buyer or successor will ask for, and which exist today
- A who-to-call list: accountant, lawyer, broker or valuator, and the question to bring each
How to use it
- 1Click "Install skill" on this page and copy the install prompt.
- 2Paste it into your AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, anything that accepts pasted text).
- 3Answer the interview honestly; the point is to hear the hard questions from a machine before you hear them from a buyer.
- 4Read the ranked fixes and pick the first two; put the quarterly milestones in your calendar.
- 5Re-run the readiness read every six months and watch the areas move.
Example
A 14-person commercial landscaping company in Kingston, owner 58, plans to sell in about three years. The interview is uncomfortable in the right places: the owner quotes every job personally, one condominium corporation is 38 percent of revenue, the books are kept by a relative and the year-end is a compilation, and the yard lease ends in 20 months. The readiness read scores owner dependence and concentration as the two things a buyer would discount hardest. The twelve-month plan starts with training the senior foreman to quote the three most common job types and taking a real two-week absence in July, then chasing two more condo boards to bring the big one under 25 percent, then a conversation with the accountant about review-engagement statements for the next two year-ends. The data room folder starts with eleven documents and a list of nine that don't exist yet.
Pro tip
Take the thirty days before you fix anything else. The list of what broke while you were gone is the most accurate readiness report you'll ever get, and it costs nothing but the nerve to leave. And start the lease conversation two years out, not two months: a landlord who knows a sale is coming is a landlord who can price it in.
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