Buyer-Ready

Every private business has a number. Most owners never see it until someone else sets it for them.

Buyer-Ready is written for the owner who is not selling, or not selling yet, and who would rather find out now what a buyer would find out later. It takes the questions a serious acquirer asks in diligence and moves them forward by several years, to the point where the answers can still be changed.

The book works through five things that decide what a company is worth and how much of that value actually survives to the owner: whether the numbers can be proven, whether the revenue holds without heroics, whether the business runs without its founder, whether it would survive a bad year or a bad week, and what the owner actually wants on the other side.

It is not a book about selling. It is a book about never being caught unprepared, which happens to be the same thing as being worth more.

A house tells you what it is by its first title. Cordis Studio opened with a picture book about the people who do physical work. Cordis Press opens with a book for the people who own the companies those people work in.

There is no shortage of writing about selling a business. There is almost nothing written for the owner who is not selling and has quietly realised that the number will be decided anyway, by someone else, at a moment of someone else’s choosing. That gap is the reason this imprint exists.