The gaps you’ve been living with become the gaps someone else finds.
Most operational complexity is tolerable until something forces it into the open: a sale, an acquisition, a merger, a new location built from a playbook, an investor’s diligence team. The system doesn’t have to be perfect day to day. It has to hold up on someone else’s timeline, under someone else’s scrutiny.
We’re the operational side of the deal, and we’re on your side of it.
A buyer pays for what they can verify.
Every owner has a number in mind. A buyer’s number is built from what their diligence team can confirm.
That means earnings that hold up once the owner’s own hours are accounted for, and customers that aren’t concentrated in two accounts. It means processes that run without the person who built them, and systems that won’t need replacing the month after close.
The distance between those two numbers is the value gap, and much of it is operational. A business that runs on its owner isn’t selling a business. It’s selling goodwill, equipment of unknown condition and inventory, and buyers price it that way.
Operational gaps can be closed, and they close best before the business goes to market.
Five situations, one operating system under test.
The diligence team will find what you didn’t fix.
A buyer’s team will map your systems, your handoffs, your data, and your dependencies whether you’ve done it first or not. The difference is whether it reads as a business that runs itself or one that runs on you. We do that mapping before they do, and fix what it finds while you still control the timeline.
The changes that legitimately raise a sale price are mostly operational: less dependence on the owner, written procedures, reporting a buyer can trust, and a management layer that stays after you leave. Each one lowers the buyer’s risk, and buyers pay more for less risk.
Know what you’re buying before you own it.
The seller’s numbers tell you what the business earned. They don’t tell you what it will cost to keep earning it: the server past its life, the process only one employee understands, the customer relationships that leave with the owner.
We look at the operation the way we’d have to run it, alongside your accountant’s financial review. You get findings you can use in the price and the terms, before you sign rather than after.
Two operating systems don’t merge because two org charts did.
There’s no point combining two companies just to add two revenue lines together. The reason to merge is what the combined operation can do that neither could alone: shared systems, one standard, one team. None of that happens by default.
Someone has to decide, deliberately, which system wins and how the rest connects to it, on a clock the deal set. We plan the integration before close and run it after, so no customers, good people or open orders are lost while it drifts.
The price is low for a reason. Find it before you buy.
A distressed business can be a good purchase if someone can fix what made it distressed. We go in before you commit and find what’s actually broken. Then we design the corrective operation: what gets stabilized first, what gets rebuilt, what gets dropped.
We stay through the first hundred days, because that’s where turnarounds succeed or fail.
The tenth location has to run like the first one, without you in the room.
Franchising is selling a proven operating system. What works at one site because the founder is standing in it has to be documented, systematized and built into the technology before it’s replicated. Otherwise every new location reinvents the problems the first one already solved.
We build that system, and we model how a new unit is likely to perform in a new market before you commit to it.
In your advisors’ language
For your attorney, CPA or broker: we work inside your deal team’s process, and our part is the operation.
You’re standing up an operating system on someone else’s old plumbing, by a date set by lawyers.
A divested business inherits infrastructure, licenses, and processes built for a parent company it no longer belongs to. Email, identity, finance systems, security — all of it has to separate cleanly and keep running, on a transition-services deadline that doesn’t move for a data migration that’s behind schedule.
Investors diligence the operation now, not just the numbers.
A clean P&L used to be enough to raise on. Now the same investors who read the financials send someone to read the operations — how information moves, who owns what, what breaks under growth. A business with real operational architecture answers those questions in the data room instead of in the meeting.
An interim COO or CIO to carry the business through the transition.
With a temporary support team when the gap is bigger than one person. See Operations →
We work for you, not the deal.
We represent one party in a transaction, never both. We work alongside your attorney, your accountant and your broker or banker, not instead of them.
Our only stake in the deal is yours.
Same method, a different clock.
Marked stages are where operational work carries the most weight.
The work is still Discover, Design, Build, Connect, Operate, Evolve. What changes is who sets the schedule, and the accountability doesn’t stop at close.
We don’t deliver recommendations and walk away. We stay accountable for the system we build.
What a buyer’s team tends to find first.
- The business can’t run for thirty days without the owner.
- Two or three customers make up a large share of revenue.
- Reporting that takes the owner a weekend to assemble.
- Technology a buyer will have to replace in the first year.
- Processes that exist only in the heads of people who may not stay.
Each one is a discount, and most of them can be fixed.
Everything that raises a sale price is built in Operations: standards, numbers you trust, a team that owns its work. Most sale preparation is operations work on a deadline.
Operations →Talk to us before the deal closes.
Before the deal closes, the integration starts, or the first new location opens. That is when this work is worth the most.