Reference library

Pre-sale brand & exit-prep resources.

Field guides, checklists, and explainers for owners selling now, soon, or already listed. Written to be useful even if you never hire us.

A reading-room corner: walnut bookshelves of bound annual reports, leather chair, brass floor lamp in afternoon light.

Field guides

Checklist · 18 min read

The Exit-Ready Brand Checklist

34 specific items a buyer's analyst will check on your website, social, sales pages, and visible touchpoints during diligence. Run through it before you list — or right now if you're already on the market.

Guide · 22 min read

How Branding Actually Affects Business Valuation

The mechanism. Goodwill, multiple expansion, and why "the same business with better assets sells for more." Cited industry research and back-of-envelope math.

Guide · 16 min read

What Buyers Actually Look For in a Small-Business Acquisition

From thirty pages of buyer LOIs and diligence checklists: the brand- and website-related signals that move offers up or down, ranked.

Playbook · 14 min read

Website Redesign Before Selling Your Business

What a pre-sale website needs to do that a customer-facing website doesn't, and the specific pages and signals an acquirer's team Googles for.

External references we trust

We didn't make any of this up. The pre-sale-brand thesis stands on a body of work — some of it our peers, some of it the people we consult with on engagements.

Exit Planning Institute — CEPA credential, Value Acceleration Methodology, the industry body for exit advisors
Built to Sell Radio — John Warrillow's podcast and Value Builder System; the canonical "build to sell" curriculum
International Business Brokers Association — Find a broker, read transaction data
BVResources — Business valuation data and SMB transaction databases
Branding for Buyout® — Ted Schlueter's book on brand-driven exit value
Exit-Ready Marketing — Shiv Narayanan's framework, SaaS-focused but principles travel