The five things a buyer checks before they pay your number.
- Score customer concentration, owner dependency, financial quality, documentation and recurring revenue — the same five things every buyer checks.
- A one-week plan: one worksheet a day, five days to a red/amber/green picture of where you stand.
- Built by Connext Partners from more than 20 years advising on business sales, mergers and acquisitions across Ireland.
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Five things come up in almost every deal.
Whichever side of the table we're sitting at. None of them show up in a set of accounts. All of them show up in due diligence — by which point there's no time left to fix them quietly, and no leverage left to negotiate from strength.
Customer concentration
How much revenue sits with your top clients — and what happens to the price if one walks. We've seen agreed prices move 20% over this alone.
Owner dependency
Whether the business still runs if the owner takes four weeks off, phone off, no contact.
Financial quality
Whether the management accounts are clean and consistent enough for a buyer to trust on sight.
Documentation
Whether a full due-diligence request list could be answered inside 30 days, not months.
Recurring revenue
How much revenue is contracted and repeats by design, versus one-off and hoped for.
Five sections. One worksheet each. A week to complete.
Each section pairs a short brief with a worksheet — score yourself honestly, and you'll finish with a clear red/amber/green picture of exactly where a buyer would push back first.
Work through it alone, sit down with your accountant for the financial and documentation sections, or run it against your own firm if that's the more pressing question.
- Day 1 Map customer concentration — your top 10 clients by revenue.
- Day 2 Score owner dependency across sales, delivery, suppliers and signing authority.
- Day 3 Run the financial quality checklist, ideally with your accountant.
- Day 4 Test the 30-day documentation list against what you actually hold.
- Day 5 Split last year's revenue and score all five areas red, amber, green.
Advisors to the advisors
Connext Partners is a corporate finance advisory firm. For more than twenty years we've worked alongside accountants and their clients across Ireland — valuing businesses and practices, preparing them for sale, advising on acquisitions and mergers, and raising debt and equity funding.
We built this checklist because the gaps a buyer finds are rarely a surprise to us — and we'd rather you closed them on your own terms than at the negotiating table.
deals in Ireland
checks, without exception
red/amber/green picture
Know what a buyer will find first.
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