A Buyer Will Find Your Business’s Problems. The Question Is Who Finds Them First.
Every business heading toward a sale has problems a sophisticated buyer’s diligence will surface. The ones that get found are used to justify a lower price, or to walk away entirely. Owners rarely get ahead of this because nobody sits down before the process starts to go looking for what a buyer would find.
The Prior Diligence Project
A guided process for owners who want to investigate their own business before a buyer does.
Prior Diligence starts with facilitation: articulating the owners’ values with respect to the business, working through the discussions and decisions about what the owners actually want from a sale, and documenting the strategy decisions that follow. Only once those decisions are made and written down does the work of implementing the Prior Diligence strategy, resolving the problems a buyer would find, on the owners’ own terms and timeline, become straightforward.
The Prior Diligence Project guides owners through that process, start to finish.
Why a Consultant
Prior Diligence is not a checklist a lawyer or accountant can run through for you. It starts with values and goals only the owners can articulate, and it only works if those decisions get documented in a way the whole business can act on. I facilitate that conversation and help translate the results into a real strategy.
I’m Rick Riebesell. I developed the Prior Diligence strategy described in Owning a Business, and have personally owned, managed, and sold businesses using it.