What I look for first.
I've spent forty years on the other side of this table. The thing that decides it is almost never the number people expect me to look at.
I'm not going to pretend a questionnaire can replace a fortnight inside a business. It cannot. But the order I look at things in has barely changed in four decades, and there's no good reason it should be a secret, so I've written it down and had it scored.
The first thing I want to know is what happens when the owner isn't there. Not whether they're busy. Everyone is busy, and being busy is the easiest thing in the world to mistake for being necessary. What I want is the specific list: which decisions wait, which clients ask for them by name, which numbers nobody else can produce.
It's an uncomfortable question, and the honest answer is usually longer than the owner expected to say out loud. That discomfort is the most useful ten minutes of the whole exercise, and it's the reason I've never found a way to ask it gently.
Almost every business I've declined to back was profitable. That was never the problem.
What stopped me was that the earnings and the owner were the same thing, and neither of us could tell where one ended and the other began. You can't buy that, you can't lend against it with any confidence, and you certainly can't hand it to a son or a daughter and call it a legacy.
The good news, and I do mean this, is that almost none of it is financial and almost all of it is fixable. It's generally a matter of writing down what's already in somebody's head, and then living with the consequence of having written it down.
What it actually asks
31 questions about how the business really runs, plus five about the business itself, in eight parts. Allow 45 minutes to an hour, most of it looking things up. None of it is difficult. A few of them will annoy you, and those are the ones I would pay most attention to.
What comes back is a number out of 100, the seven readings behind it, the things somebody from outside would notice first, and the three answers they would press on hardest. You can read it on screen the moment you finish, and have it emailed if you'd rather read it later.
If you would like to know
It's free, there's nothing to buy to see your result, and nobody is going to ring you about it. Your answers save as you go, and the sheet will email you a link back if you'd prefer to finish another time.
It scores what you tell it, so answer it carelessly and you'll get a careless number. It's not a valuation, it won't tell you what anyone would pay, and it's not financial, accounting or legal advice. There is a longer written report afterwards for anyone who wants to go further, and nothing is held back from the free one to sell it.
You're thinking about selling
Whether there's an offer in front of you or it's years away, the things I'd look at first are rarely the ones owners expect.
Start the assessmentYou're raising or borrowing
An investor isn't buying the business so much as working out whether it still earns when you're not in the room.
Start the assessmentNeither, you're just curious
Then the honest question is whether the place could run for a month without you, and what stops first if it can't.
Start the assessment
If you'd rather go through it with someone, that's the work I do with the firm: Manolutions.
Your answers are yours. We do not sell them. We do use anonymised data, aggregated, to establish industry, regional and other statistics.