Seventy percent of businesses that go to market never sell. Buyers discount messy financials, owner dependency, and concentrated revenue — or they walk. We fix those value gaps before a buyer ever sees your business, so you exit at a premium instead of a fire sale.
Book Your Free Exit-Readiness CallEvery acquirer — strategic, private equity, or individual — prices your business against the same value drivers. Weakness in any of them costs you in multiple, deal structure, or a failed process.
Books a quality-of-earnings team can trust — clean revenue recognition, accruals, and owner add-backs that survive scrutiny.
02Monthly packages that prove you run the business by the numbers — not by feel.
03The business documented so it transfers — operations that don't live in anyone's head.
04Revenue, relationships, and decisions that survive your departure — the single biggest discount driver.
05No single customer that can kill the deal — and a plan to de-risk the ones that could.
06Margins that show the business charges what it's worth — often the fastest EBITDA lever.
07Collections, payables, and inventory discipline — so the working-capital peg doesn't eat your proceeds.
08A believable, documented path the next owner is buying — backed by pipeline, not hope.
A disciplined path from "someday I'll sell" to a business buyers compete for.
Free 30 minutes on Zoom. Your timeline, your revenue range, and the two or three gaps costing you the most enterprise value. Useful whether or not we ever work together.
A three-week diagnostic: financial-quality review, scorecard across all eight value drivers, a valuation-range estimate, and a prioritized 12–36 month roadmap in a written report you can share with your CPA and attorney.
We execute the roadmap with you month by month: reporting packages, SOP program, owner-dependency reduction, pricing and working-capital fixes — with your value re-scored every quarter.
For qualifying clients, our firm may make an offer to acquire the business — at an independently supported valuation, under a separate agreement your own attorney reviews, structured as a right of first offer. You always remain free to sell to anyone. It costs you nothing, and it means at least one credible buyer is at your table from day one.
Full program terms, including all disclosures, are provided in writing and reviewed with your attorney before any engagement.
How the program worksMessy books are the most common and most fixable gap. With 12–36 months of runway, financial quality can be rebuilt to the standard buyers and their quality-of-earnings teams expect. The worst option is waiting until a buyer finds the mess for you — that's when discounts, retrades, and dead deals happen.
Most businesses that fail to sell fail for predictable, fixable reasons: owner dependency, customer concentration, weak reporting, unreliable earnings. The assessment scores you across all eight drivers and gives you a prioritized roadmap — sellability stops being a mystery and becomes a project plan.
Brokers sell the business you have today. We spend 12–36 months improving the business the buyer will eventually see, so it commands a stronger multiple. When you're ready for market, your broker or banker sells a cleaner, better-documented, less owner-dependent company. We're happy to work alongside them.
An optional, fully disclosed program in which our firm may make an offer to acquire a client business at an independently supported valuation — a right of first offer, never a right of first refusal, in a separate agreement your own attorney reviews. You always remain free to sell to anyone else.
For owners of US businesses, typically $1M–$50M revenue, who want to exit in 1–5 years and are willing to do the work. Not for owners who need to sell in the next 90 days — that's a broker conversation, and we'll tell you so on the call.
Thirty minutes, free, on Zoom. You'll leave with your two or three highest-leverage value fixes, whether or not we ever work together.
Book Your Free Exit-Readiness CallSterling Exit Partners
10 South Riverside Plaza, Chicago, IL 60606
info@sterlingexitpartners.com