A buyer won’t pay for the factory. They’ll pay for the numbers behind it.
The PE letters are already arriving, and a sale price is a multiple times earnings. Both numbers live in books built for the tax return, not the deal. In 14 days, we show you your company the way a buyer will, in dollars, guaranteed: at least 3x the fee in owner-accepted value identified, or you pay nothing.
30 minutes with Russ. No pitch. You leave knowing what a buyer would question first.
The trailing-twelve clock doesn’t start until the numbers are true.
Every month you wait moves the sale date a month. Most owners aren’t waiting for the right market. They’re waiting for numbers they’d be willing to show: standard costs that match reality, product lines allocated to the truth, a customer list a buyer doesn’t price as risk.
The mess isn’t negligence. Growth covered it, and the people producing the numbers were never paid to look. But a buyer will look, at input-cost drift, phantom discounts, standard versus actual cost, SKU profitability, and concentration, and whatever they can’t believe comes off the price.
Your books tell you what happened. They can’t tell you what to do next.
The decisions weren’t wrong. You made them on the only numbers you had, and those numbers were never built to decide from. Everyone who touches your books is paid to serve something else: the filing, the close, the report. Nobody is paid to make your company worth believing, and that is the job we do.
Three traps that hide inside a clean P&L.
The Six Trap Diagnostic™ reads your numbers through the decisions that produced them. Three of the six do the most damage in a product business, and every one of them shows up in diligence with a discount attached.
Pricing anchored to input costs that moved years ago is the most common trapped margin on a factory floor, and the fastest to recover once the standard costs get re-run against reality.
A clean aggregate P&L hides which SKUs and lines carry the business and which quietly bleed. The product-line math never gets run, so the cross-subsidy compounds.
The largest customer is often the least profitable. The account you are most afraid to reprice is usually the one capping your margin, and the math never gets run because the answer feels dangerous.
Two product companies. The gap was never the market. It was the numbers.
The bankers said $25M to $35M, on books the owner didn’t trust.
Mispriced inputs, phantom discounts, and revenue never brought over. Pricing was anchored to costs that had moved years earlier, and the aggregate P&L hid which products carried the business. We rebuilt the numbers and modeled the path forward.
The account nobody would touch was the margin everyone was looking for.
The largest customer was the least profitable. The account felt untouchable, so the math never got run, and full cost allocation showed it was funded by everyone else. We repriced and reset terms instead of protecting the logo.
Anonymized by segment and revenue band until attribution is confirmed.
Two doors. Same engine. Same guarantee.
Both start with 14 days and end with owner-accepted value in dollars: at least 3x the fee identified, or you pay nothing. Typical results run 5x to 10x.
The Sellable-Numbers Scan
A sale, a PE approach, a succession on the table? The Scan shows you your company the way a buyer will, in dollars, in 14 days: what diligence would knock off your number, where the value expansion lives, and the first three moves. From $10,000, fixed.
The Scan, in full →The Decision Diagnostic
Same engine, without the buyer's lens: which products, SKUs, and customers actually make money, where the recoverable value sits, and what to do first. The same numbers are costing you every month, deal or no deal.
The Diagnostic, in full →Pricing is banded by revenue and fixed before we begin: see the bands. The mechanics are public: read the guarantee. One next step either way: a 30-minute fit call.
Decide from the numbers. Prove it in the cash.
One 30-minute fit call. If it fits, the 14 days start. If your banker or CPA sent you this page, this is the work they meant.