Quick Ways to Increase Value Before Sale

1. Refresh Branding and Marketing Materials. Hire a skilled website designer and update print collateral. If you lack printed leave-behinds for trade shows, seminars, or prospect meetings, create them.
2. Strengthen IP Protections. If you lack key registrations, apply for them. See our article How to Value and Protect Your Intellectual Property.
3. Raise Positive Visibility. Collect testimonials, pursue speaking engagements, and seek trade press coverage. Promote without hype.
4. Confirm a Clean Credit File. Contact D&B. Correct errors and resolve defects.
5. Survey Employees. Measure morale, gather suggestions on operations, culture, and customer service, then track implementation.
6. Survey Customers. Score satisfaction (1-5 across key criteria). Act on suggestions and repeat periodically.
7. Resolve Legal or Administrative Loose Ends. Clear outstanding disputes, filings, taxes, and regulatory obligations. Ensure your rights to operate are documented.
8. Review Compensation Structures. Ensure payroll, benefits, and incentive plans comply with applicable regulations.
9. Obtain Employee NDAs and Non-Competition Agreements. Note that all contracts require exchanges of value between or among the parties to be enforceable. Consult legal counsel—many states now restrict, even ban, non-competes.
10. Address Chronic Employee Performance Issues. Even if they’re “sacred cows.”
11. Bring Corporate Records Current. Minutes, regulatory filings, ownership agreements, and environmental clearances.
12. Separate Personal from Business Finances are among the most problematic areas for buyers. Get clean. Ready yourself to pass the buyer’s “Quality of Earnings” (QoE) audit by documenting every owner-benefit add-back (e.g., personal vehicles, club memberships) with receipts. Inflated personal expenses kill deals.
13. Right-Size the Organization. Aim for about five direct reports and encourage other senior managers to do the same.
14. Clean Up A/R and A/P. Buyers will discount old receivables more than you would and reduce your company’s purchase price by the full value of overdue payables.
15. Optimize Net Working Capital (NWC). Confirm the business has sufficient operating cash so that its owner isn’t required to contribute more. Buyers don’t want to “buy” a company twice.
16. Review Key Employee Transaction Incentives. Buyers want senior managers motivated to close a sale.
17. Identify Your Internal “M&A Team.” This typically includes the owner/CEO, the successor (if one exists), the CFO/controller, the COO, and/or the CMO.
18. Add external deal support: M&A attorney and M&A advisor.
19. Resolve Loan Covenant or Other Contractual Issues. A clean legal posture signals lower risk.
20. Improve KPI Reporting. Ensure your system can produce timely, reliable data — especially pipeline and client-level data. Buyers don’t just look at your dashboards; their data teams will also want raw historical data to verify customer cohort retention and lifetime value (LTV). If you can’t deliver virgin transactional data, expect deal delays.
21. Improve Facility Appearance. Clean, paint, and fix anything’s that broken or sloppy–especially bathrooms. First impressions matter.
22. Upgrade Financial Reporting. Use accrual accounting regardless of company size. For revenue under $10 million, prepare compiled financials; at $10-$20 million, obtain reviewed statements; above that, audited statements.
23. Sell Obsolete Inventory. Otherwise, as with aged A/R, buyers will discount it heavily.
24. Beware Misclassifying W-2 Employees as 1099 Contractors. Buyers discount value when 1099 classifications are used to dodge W-2 taxes. Worker classification audits by tax authorities have intensified. Misclassification can result in buyers requiring seller escrow holdbacks  or even crater the deal.
25. Quantify your customer concentration risk; if a single client accounts for more than 15% of sales, buyers will discount your valuation and/or find ways to turn cash at closing into earn-outs. One way to counter this disadvantage is to offer the key client a reduced cost, multi-year contract.

Wrapping Up

Expect buyers to scrutinize every aspect of your operations over the past three years. (To see in more detail what they look for, visit The Perfect Confidential Memorandum.)

Recent M&A deal flow data reveals that roughly one-third of signed Letters of Intent fail to close, with non-financial diligence findings and financial discrepancies accounting for nearly half of the casualties. Clean preparation isn’t just about getting a better price—it’s also about simply closing the deal.

While the above project list may appear long, each item can be addressed independently, and almost always adds more value than it costs to complete.

Revised 7/19/26. © 2026 Kuhn Capital, Inc. All Rights Reserved