Thinking about selling in the next one to three years? The biggest thing you can do for your valuation is get the business out of your head and into systems a buyer can trust. That's what we build.
Working Scotland-wide: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee.
Scored across ten areas, with a prioritised gap list. This is what your audit delivers.
Most owner-managed businesses run brilliantly, right up until you ask how. The supplier deals live in your head. The pricing logic lives in your head. Two or three key people hold everything else, and none of it's written down.
You know it works. But a buyer can't buy what they can't see. They call it key-man risk, and they punish it: chipped offers, dragged-out due diligence, earn-outs that keep you tied to the desk for years after the sale. Sometimes the deal just quietly dies.
None of that reflects the quality of your business. It reflects the paperwork. And unlike your customer base or your margins, the paperwork is completely fixable in a year.
Buyers don't pay for potential. They pay for proof.
Not a lever-arch file of dusty procedures either. It's how the business actually runs, captured as working systems: who does what, how the decisions get made, and what good looks like. Detailed enough that someone else can pick it up and run it without you in the room.
Every core process written the way it actually happens: sales, delivery, finance, the lot. Proper SOPs, built from interviews rather than blank templates, and detailed enough that a new person can follow one without asking you first.
One-glance visual maps of how work flows through the business. Due diligence teams love these, because they answer questions before they're asked.
Every person, supplier and system the business leans on, with the risk flagged and a plan against each one. Key-man risk, named and managed.
Your documents organised the way an acquirer's advisors expect to find them. Fast answers, no midnight scrambling when the requests start.
How it's built: structured interviews with you and your key people, recorded, transcribed and processed through our documentation pipeline. You talk, we write. Nobody on your team has to author a single procedure.
A site visit or remote review, a structured owner interview, and a full systems inventory. You get a scored readiness report across ten areas, plus a prioritised gap list. Useful on its own, even if you stop here.
We scope the programme from your audit results: what to fix, in what order, at a fixed price. No day rates, no scope creep. Your audit fee comes off the total.
Interviews with you and your key staff, turned into the working system: operating manual, process maps, dependency register, data room. We finish by re-scoring you, so you can see the movement.
The audit is designed to stand on its own. Plenty of owners will take the report and do the work themselves, and that's a perfectly good outcome. So here's exactly what you keep, whether or not you ever speak to us again.
Every gap we find, ordered by what it would cost you at the negotiating table rather than by how easy it is to fix. Hand it to your own team and work down the list.
Ten areas, each scored out of ten. Re-run it in a year and you'll see whether you've actually moved, instead of hoping you have.
Sometimes the honest finding is that you're three years out, not one. Much better to know that before you appoint a broker and start a clock you can't easily stop.
Written to be handed straight to your existing advisors, so the financial and legal side can get moving against a clear, prioritised list.
I'm Colin Gray. Over fifteen years I built two companies: The Podcast Host, which grew from a one-man blog into the biggest media company in our industry worldwide, and Alitu, a software company that passed $1M in annual recurring revenue. In 2025 I sold both, in a single process. Two businesses, two sets of books, two sets of systems, one deal. It was every bit as complicated as it sounds.
So I've been through due diligence from the seller's chair: the document requests, the questions about who does what, the sharp focus on whether the thing survives without the founder. The ones that sail through it aren't simply the businesses with tidy paperwork. They're the ones running on real systems, where the processes already existed and people were already following them without the owner in the middle.
Mine were in better shape than most, and that's a big part of why the deal closed. But I came out the other side knowing exactly where I'd been kidding myself, and what I'd have fixed given another year's warning. That second bit is arguably worth more than the first, and it's the part you get to use. I now spend my time helping Scottish owners get there before a buyer starts asking. (My PhD's in education, which turns out to be surprisingly useful for teaching a business to explain itself.)
Colin Gray, Founder
If you advise owner-managers who are two or three years from exit, readiness is the gap between the valuation they want and the offer they'll get. We work alongside you, not around you: you keep the client relationship and the financial work, we handle the operational documentation. Ask us for a referral pack.
It's the sweet spot. Documentation takes months to build and a year or more to bed in, and buyers want to see systems that have been running, not systems finished the week before the sale memorandum went out. Start now and the work is invisible by the time anyone's doing diligence. Start late and it looks like what it is: a rush job.
Then you've just had the cheapest bad news you'll ever get. Far better you find it now than a buyer finds it in due diligence, where every gap has a price attached. The report comes with a prioritised gap list, so a horror show simply becomes a work plan.
Owner-managed Scottish businesses where the owner is still central to how things run. We've seen it across trades, hospitality, manufacturing and services: the sector matters far less than the dependency. If the business would wobble without you for a month, this is for you.
Both work. A site visit is ideal for the audit, and Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee are all easy reach. But the whole process, interviews included, runs perfectly well remotely, so location's never a blocker.
A 20-minute call. No pitch deck, no obligation. We'll talk about your timeline and whether an audit is worth your money. If it isn't, I'll say so.
Book an intro call