Most owners think the sale is won in negotiation. In practice, much of the price is set long before a buyer appears — by the state of the business the buyer finds. A business with documented financials, contracted revenue and a management team that can run without the owner sells on its numbers. A business missing those things sells at a discount to its numbers, no matter how good the negotiator is.
That is why the highest-return work in any exit happens six to twenty-four months before going to market. The problem has always been knowing what to fix, in what order. That is the part AI has changed.
Given the facts of your business, the engine evaluates the same drivers a buyer's model will:
Reading the drivers is half the job. The other half is thinking like the other side. Before a business goes to market, our engine runs what we call a Buyer Simulation: it works your business the way a skeptical acquirer would — the questions they will ask, the discounts they will push for, the weak points in concentration, owner dependence and add-back documentation they will find. You can read how the full system works on The Engine page.
The output is not a grade. It is a list: here is what a buyer will challenge, here is what it likely costs you if you go to market as-is, and here is what is fixable in the time you have.
Every business is different, but the pre-market work usually falls into a few buckets: substantiate the financials so every number can be defended; document add-backs with evidence, not memory; move handshake revenue onto contracts; delegate the relationships and decisions that currently run through you; confirm that key contracts and leases can transfer to a buyer; and resolve anything — a licence, a lawsuit, a property held in the wrong entity — that would surface awkwardly in diligence. None of this is glamorous. All of it shows up in the price.
Want the read on your business? The free Exit Profile takes eleven questions and shows your value range, drivers and readiness — no email needed. Start it now →
AI does the reading, the flagging and the monitoring. It does not decide anything, and it does not negotiate. A senior principal from our deal team reviews the analysis with you, helps you weigh which fixes are worth the time, and runs the conversations that matter when you do go to market. And the one rule of the entire process is simple: nothing material happens without your written go-ahead. If you are weighing this against a traditional route, our AI vs. Broker comparison lays out the differences plainly — the point is not AI instead of people, it is getting both.
The easiest way to start is the free Exit Profile. Eleven questions, about three minutes, and the AI gives you a read: an estimated value range, the drivers helping and hurting you, the buyer categories likely to want a business like yours, and how exit-ready you are today. There is no charge, no email required to see the result, and no obligation — our only fee is a success fee paid at close, so if you never sell, you never pay us anything.
Six to twenty-four months before you want to go to market. Some fixes, like documenting add-backs or tidying contracts, take weeks. Others, like reducing customer concentration or building management depth, take a year or more. The earlier the read, the more of the fix-it list you can actually complete before buyers see the business.
AI can produce a defensible value range and, more usefully, show which specific drivers are holding that range down. A final price is set by a negotiation between real people. That is why our process pairs the AI's analysis with a senior principal from our deal team, and why nothing is decided by software alone.