What to fix before you put an Adelaide business on the market

An owner who decides in March to sell by June is going to market with whatever the business looks like on the day. That's usually the version that has been optimised for the owner to operate, not for a stranger to buy.

The gap between those 2 versions is operational, and it takes months to close rather than weeks. This is a checklist of what a buyer looks at that an owner can actually change: whether the business depends on you, whether the numbers can be followed by somebody who wasn't there, how much of the revenue is a personal relationship, and whether the day-to-day work exists anywhere outside your head. If you want the market context around it first, the state of small business in South Australia covers the landscape these businesses trade in.

To be clear about what this page is: ADL Business Coach doesn't deliver coaching and doesn't broker business sales. It's a matching service that introduces owners to separate, independent Adelaide coaching businesses. What follows is the operational preparation, not a transaction service.

What a buyer is actually buying

A buyer isn't buying last year's revenue. They're buying their own forecast of next year's, discounted by everything they can't verify and everything that looks like it might leave.

That reframes the whole preparation job. Every hour spent making the business more verifiable and less dependent on 1 person is an hour spent on the only 2 levers an owner controls before a sale. Almost nothing else on the to-do list moves the needle in the same way.

It also explains why 2 businesses with identical revenue get treated completely differently. The one where the owner works 25 hours a week on the business and a manager runs the floor is a different proposition to the one where the owner works 70 hours a week in it and knows every price by heart, even if the profit line looks the same.

A buyer prices what they can see and what they believe will still be there in 12 months. Everything else gets discounted or excluded.

Owner dependency is the first thing discounted

The test is the same as the succession test. Can the business trade for a month with the owner genuinely uncontactable?

If it can't, the buyer is not purchasing a business. They're purchasing a job, plus the risk that they're worse at it than you are. Some buyers will still do that. They'll just do it on terms that reflect it, and they'll usually want the seller to stay on for a long handover period to prove the thing works without them.

The practical work, in order:

1. List every decision that routes through you, over a full fortnight. Most owners are surprised at the volume.
2. Give each one away with a boundary. A named person, a dollar limit, and a written rule for what happens above it.
3. Stop being the escalation point by default. If the answer to "who do I ask" is always the owner, nothing has actually moved.
4. Take the month off before a buyer asks you to. A tested claim is worth something. An untested one is a sentence in a listing.

Do that early enough and it stops being a sale preparation exercise and starts being a better business to own, which is the version that survives you deciding not to sell after all.

Numbers a stranger can follow

Buyers and their advisers form a view of risk from how quickly they can reconcile what they're told with what the records show. Slow reconciliation reads as either disorganisation or something being hidden, and both get priced in.

Legible means the monthly reporting is produced on a schedule, from the accounting system, and it agrees with the bank. It means revenue is split in a way that means something: by job type, by service line, by site, by customer. It means personal expenses that have historically run through the business are identified and separated, not explained verbally. And it means somebody other than you can produce and explain the report.

If you're not sure which numbers a buyer will actually ask about, the numbers every owner should know by heart is the working list. An owner who can answer those without opening a laptop is an owner whose business looks well run before anything is even verified.

How much of the revenue walks out with you?

There are 2 separate concentration questions and they get confused constantly.

The first is customer concentration: how much of the revenue sits with the largest handful of accounts. A business where a single customer is a quarter of turnover carries a risk the buyer has to underwrite, and that shows up in the terms rather than in a conversation.

The second is relationship concentration: how many of those accounts are a relationship with the owner personally. This is the one owners underestimate. Revenue spread across 40 customers still walks if all 40 of them ring you by name and have never spoken to anybody else in the business.

The fix for both is slow, which is the argument for starting a year out. Deliberately move the named relationships to other people in the business. Get a second contact into every significant account. Where a customer relationship is genuinely personal and can't be transferred, say so early rather than have it surface in verification.

Records, agreements and the boring half

The unglamorous half of preparation is simply having things exist as documents.

That means the supplier arrangements the business actually depends on are written down somewhere rather than being a 15-year understanding. It means the equipment register matches the equipment. It means staff records are complete and current. It means anything the business relies on to keep operating, from a licence to a piece of software to a site arrangement, is identified with its renewal date and its terms in a file.

What those documents say, and what happens to them when a business changes hands, is a question for your lawyer. The operational job is narrower and it's yours: make sure they exist, make sure they're current, and make sure somebody can find them in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. A verification process that turns into a scavenger hunt costs time, and time is where sale processes die.

The 12 months before you list

If there's a year available, the sequence that works looks roughly like this.

Months 1 to 3. Clean up the reporting so it's produced monthly, on time, from the system. Split the revenue properly. Get the personal items out. Fix the price list so it's a document.

Months 4 to 6. Start the delegation work in earnest. Decisions, then relationships. Write the 10 task sequences that would otherwise leave with you.

Months 7 to 9. Test it. Take real leave. Watch what breaks and fix the causes rather than the symptoms. Get a second contact into every significant account.

Months 10 to 12. Assemble the documents. Bring in your accountant and your lawyer properly, with a business that's already legible, which makes their work faster and cheaper.

Owners who compress this into 8 weeks generally end up doing the same work anyway, during verification, under time pressure, with a buyer watching. That's the expensive version.

It's also worth knowing what the alternative to a prepared sale looks like. What SA insolvency data tells owners about their own risk is a useful counterweight to the assumption that there's always time to get organised later.

What this post doesn't cover, and who does

Everything above is operational readiness. It's deliberately silent on the parts of a sale that belong to qualified people, and that silence is the point.

What the business is worth, how a sale is structured, what a transaction means for the parties, what the agreements say and what happens to the proceeds are not blog-post questions. They belong with your accountant, your lawyer and a licensed adviser, and they're cheaper and faster to answer once the operational picture is already clean.

If the handover is to family rather than to a buyer, most of this list still applies, and succession planning in a South Australian family business covers the parts that differ. If you're working through the readiness side of it and want somebody experienced in the room, succession and exit planning sets out what that work usually looks like with an Adelaide coach.