Dear Fellow Business Owner,

I retired after 15 years investing in private businesses. I don't need to work — but I found I missed the conversations. There's something about sitting across from someone who's built something real and helping them get more out of what they've got. Also my kids have all moved on with their lives, I have more time on my hands. So I take on a handful of businesses each year. Not clients — more like partners. People I could see becoming friends with, who deserve to walk away with every dollar they built — not whatever a buyer decides to put on the table.

And I write to business owners like you because there's a question I've asked hundreds of them over the past two decades, and almost none of them can answer it accurately:

Most don't know. Some guess. A few quote a number their CPA mentioned two years ago. And nearly all of them are off — sometimes by 30 to 60 percent.

That might sound like an abstract problem until you do the math. If your business generates $1.5 million in normalized EBITDA and you think your multiple is 6x, you believe you're sitting on a $9 million asset. But if the actual multiple a buyer would offer is 4x — because of risks you can't see from the inside — the real number is $6 million. That's a $3 million gap. And most owners don't discover it until they're already in a negotiation.

This isn't a knowledge problem. These are smart, capable people who've built something real. It's a visibility problem.

When you've spent a decade or more inside a business, you lose the ability to see it the way an outsider does. You know your strengths intimately — your team, your client relationships, your reputation in the market. But a buyer doesn't start with your strengths. They start with your risks.

Customer concentration. Founder dependency. Revenue predictability. Margin trends. Operational scalability. The things most owners don't track — because they've been too busy building.

Let me tell you what I've seen happen — more times than I'd like to count.

An owner gets a call. A buyer is interested. Maybe it's a private equity group, maybe a strategic acquirer, maybe a competitor. There's an initial conversation. Numbers get mentioned. The owner gets excited — finally, someone sees the value they've built.

Then comes due diligence. And that's where things unravel.

The buyer's team starts pulling threads. They discover that 40% of revenue comes from two clients. They learn the founder is involved in every major decision. They see that the management team has no depth — if the owner leaves, the business doesn't just slow down, it stops. They notice the financials are technically accurate but not presented in a way that tells a clean story.

What happens next isn't pretty. The initial offer gets revised downward. The deal structure shifts — more earnouts, more seller financing, more contingencies. Sometimes the buyer walks away entirely. And the owner is left wondering what just happened.

What happened is predictable and preventable. The owner didn't know their score. They didn't know which category was weak. And by the time they found out, the buyer was already using that weakness as leverage.

That number is not a typo. Multiple studies — from business brokers, M&A advisors, and the Exit Planning Institute — confirm it: roughly 70 to 80 percent of businesses that go to market never sell. For smaller businesses under $1 million in revenue, the number is even worse — fewer than one in five find a buyer.

Think about that for a moment. An owner spends 10, 20, sometimes 30 years building a business — and when they're finally ready to monetize that life's work, four out of five walk away with nothing. They close the doors. They liquidate equipment. They watch the asset they built disappear.

And here's the part that should matter to you: the reasons these deals fail map directly to the same categories our assessment measures. Customer concentration too high — that's Business Fundamentals. Financials aren't clean enough for diligence — Financial Performance. The business can't run without the founder — Management & Operations. No plan for deal structure or transition — Exit Readiness.

These aren't random failures. They're predictable failures — the same patterns, in the same categories, over and over. The owners who fall into that 80% aren't bad operators. They simply never got a clear read on where they stood until a buyer showed them — and by then, the answer was "no thank you."

In my experience, business owners who sense they need to understand their value typically do one of three things. All three are mistakes.

There is a fourth option. One that takes two minutes, costs nothing, and gives you the same type of data that buyers use internally to set multiples.

But first, let me show you what that data looks like in practice.

That's what visibility does. It doesn't change your business overnight. It shows you what to change — and what's actually worth changing.

If you're still reading, let me share one more insight that might be useful.

Of all the business owners who've taken this assessment, the most common weak category — by a significant margin — is Business Fundamentals. Specifically, founder dependency.

It makes sense if you think about it. The qualities that make someone a great builder — deep client relationships, hands-on decision-making, personal attention to quality — are the same qualities that make a business hard to sell. A buyer is purchasing a system, not a person. If the system only works when you're in the building, the system isn't worth much.

The second most common weak category is Exit Readiness. Not because the business isn't ready operationally, but because the owner hasn't thought about it structurally. Deal terms. Tax implications. Earnout exposure. Non-compete considerations. The architecture of the exit itself.

Both of these categories are fixable. But only if you know they're weak. And most owners don't — until a buyer tells them, at the worst possible moment.

The framework that buyers use to evaluate acquisition targets scores businesses across five categories. Here's what they're actually measuring:

Each category produces a sub-score. The composite determines your EBITDA multiple range — which is what a buyer uses to calculate what they would pay for your business. A business scoring 84 or above is in a fundamentally different negotiating position than one scoring 54. Same industry. Same revenue. Different multiple.

I've distilled that framework into a 12-question assessment that produces the same type of institutional-grade score. It takes two minutes. It gives you an Investability Score — 0 to 100 — along with a risk tier, a valuation range, and specific recommendations for where to focus your energy.

One last thought, and I think it's the most important one.

The best time to know your score is three years before you plan to sell.

Three years gives you time to address founder dependency. To build management depth. To shift revenue from project-based to recurring. To clean up the financials and create a narrative a buyer can follow. Three years is the difference between reacting to a buyer's concerns and never giving them a reason to have concerns in the first place.

The second-best time is today.

Whether you're seriously considering an exit in the near term or simply want to understand what you've built from a buyer's perspective, the assessment takes two minutes and will give you something most business owners never have: an honest, objective measure of where you stand.

I made it free because I believe every business owner who has put years into building something valuable deserves to know what that thing is actually worth — not what they hope it's worth, not what someone flatters them into believing, but what the market would actually bear.

If you're curious — or even a little skeptical — I'd encourage you to take two minutes and see where your business stands. The assessment is right below.

I think you'll find it clarifying.