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A founder took calls with potential buyers years before hiring an M&A firm, with no intention of selling. The point was to find out what they would actually pay for.
This founder runs a finance transformation firm built over years of saying yes: yes to clients, yes to scope, yes to logos. By the time an exit was on the horizon, the firm was really several businesses stacked on each other. Implementation work. A productized post-implementation retainer. An outsourced operations arm built for a client that lost its own team during COVID. A product. And a time-and-materials bucket the founder was steadily shrinking.
Rather than guess which of those a buyer would value, this founder went and found out: studying the question inside C54, and entertaining calls with potential buyers long before hiring an M&A firm, purely to hear what they asked about.
“I understood that they’re gonna buy me for my logos, my customer portfolio. They’re gonna buy me because of my in-depth expertise in certain area. And because of those retainers, essentially, of that secured recurring revenue. And not for my implementation.”
Implementation was the firm’s origin and, for years, the bulk of its revenue. It was also the line a buyer would not pay for.
So the operating model moved to match. Pods restructured around converting projects into retainers. Bonuses tied to retention and Net Promoter Scores rather than delivery. The productized “we implemented it, now what?” work pushed to the front of the offer, which turned out to open bigger partner doors too. And the books rebuilt to tell the story those buyer conversations said mattered.
Why it matters to you
Most founders learn what a buyer values during diligence, which is roughly a decade too late to do anything about it. The information is not hard to get. Buyers will take the call, and they will tell you what they screen for, years before you are a candidate.
Get that answer early and it stops being an exit prep exercise. It becomes an operating decision you can act on for years: which service line to productize, which to shrink, what to bonus people on, and which revenue to stop chasing even when it is profitable today.
Your one thing
Name the revenue line a buyer would pay the most for, and the one they would pay nothing for. If you are guessing, you have the wrong source. Ask three people who buy firms like yours.
Collective 54 is where boutique service firm founders go to make more money, scale with less friction, and build a firm worth buying.
See if it’s a fit →