For exit planners and M&A advisers whose clients still run through the owner

Buyers discount a company that runs through its owner. You see it in the valuation. The fix is operational: who decides what, written processes, and numbers the team owns. We do that part before the sale, while you run the process and keep the client.

Efficiency Sprint makes companies operationally ready for AI.

Owner dependency is a decision-rights problem before it's a valuation problem

When pricing, hiring, refunds and the big accounts still go to the owner, the business can't run without them. A buyer sees that in diligence and prices it in. The problem starts long before the deal: nobody was ever given the right to decide.

Measure it in a week

Ask the owner to log every decision that waits on them for seven days. In our work, owners of small companies often field more than 100 a week. That list is the map of what has to move before a buyer looks. More on preparing a company for sale: how to prepare your company to be sold.

What a Diagnostic before a sale looks like

Two weeks. Two hours with the owner, 15 minutes with each key person, and read-only access to the systems. The owner gets a roadmap: where the company stands on SCOPE™ by Efficiency Sprint, how many decisions wait on the owner, the key-person risk, what to fix first, and a decision authority matrix for the key roles. How the Diagnostic works.

What it looked like in practice

In a construction company where everything ran through the owner, the sales pipeline went from $1M to $14.5M in three months. Once one person owned receivables, $1.2M of $1.4M in overdue invoices came in. That's what was done in one company, not a forecast for the next.

How working together goes

You keep the client and the deal. We fix the operations side and report back to you after every step. It's a referral relationship: if you introduce an owner and they become a client, we talk about how that works for you on a call.

Next step

Questions

Do you compete with us?

No. We don't sell businesses, value them or run deals. We work inside the company on how it runs.

How long before a sale should it start?

The earlier the better. The Diagnostic takes two weeks. In our engagements, a visible change took three to six months.

What does the owner have to do?

Two hours at the start, 90 minutes at the readout, and 15 minutes from each key person. Then the work of handing decisions over, which we do with them.

Does it work for PE add-ons?

Yes. Every company is assessed the same way, so the results compare across a portfolio. See AI readiness for portfolio companies.

What does it cost?

We scope it on a short call, based on the size of the company.