A fixed-price, fixed-scope readiness review of your business: a supportable SDE view, the add-backs most likely to survive diligence, document gaps, and the fixes most likely to improve readiness. Written report plus a 60-minute call.
Start the 5-minute intake → Or email contact@b4thedeal.com directly. No payment due until your intake is reviewed and accepted.Owners of small businesses — roughly $250K to $5M in enterprise value — who may sell within the next three years. You don't need clean books, a fixed timeline, or a broker. You need a defensible view of how a buyer may assess the business, what could fail in diligence, and what to fix first. Discovering gaps after diligence starts can leave less time to address them.
No payment is due with intake. If your intake is accepted, you'll receive the written scope and payment instructions before proceeding. The ten-business-day clock starts when the agreed documents arrive.
Need something deeper? A comprehensive Owner Readiness Review — a full-scope engagement with a 90-day follow-up — is available at $3,495. Ask when you write in.
Tell us enough to decide whether the review fits. Do not include tax returns, financial statements, customer data, employee data, or other confidential documents.
Before the Deal is run by an M&A advisor with 25 years inside business sales — the same person behind the Before the Deal channel, where the methods in this review (SDE, add-backs, the document list, multiples) are taught free. The review applies them to your business, with your numbers.
This is an educational readiness review. It is not legal, tax, accounting, valuation, lending, investment, or transaction advice, and it is not a formal appraisal or valuation opinion.
We do not broker sales, represent you in a transaction, or introduce buyers. There is no back-end brokerage pitch on the call.
Your information is handled as confidential and used only to evaluate, deliver, and administer your review. Our hosting and email providers process it only to operate those services; we do not sell it or reference your engagement without written permission.
Scope is fixed to the six items above. The report states explicitly what was and wasn't reviewed — that protects both of us.
No — come as you are. Messy books are one of the main reasons to do this now: the review identifies which cleanup work may improve supportability and which work is unlikely to change buyer or lender confidence. Waiting until everything is "ready" can delay the useful diagnosis.
No. This BTD review is separate from brokerage, listing representation, buyer representation, and buyer introductions; the call has no representation upsell. If you independently need transaction help, we'll identify the types of professionals to consider, but that is outside this engagement.
Starting one to three years before a possible sale generally leaves more time to address owner-dependence, books, customer concentration, and other readiness gaps. A shorter runway can still support a useful review, but there may be less time for operational changes to show up in the records a buyer examines.
This review is built for owners. If you're buying, start with the free episodes on the channel — the six stages, SDE, and multiples are all there — and the free Deal-Readiness Checklist covers the buyer's side of the same documents.
Five minutes of intake. Ten business days to a report. One hour on the phone.
Find the readiness gaps before diligence does.