Expert Opinion: Why every business should be built to sell, even if you never intend to

Stockport based business advisor, Julian Stafford, discusses why making your business attractive for potential buyers brings benefits long before you are ready to sell.

Ask most business owners about exit planning and you’ll get the same answer: “That’s for when I’m ready to sell.” It’s an understandable view. It’s also the one that costs owners the most.

I spent over two decades building Midshire Business Systems from a standing start to £35 million turnover before selling to Sharp in 2017. The work that made Midshire saleable, the systems, the data, the margin discipline, was also what made it a genuinely better business to run in the years before any sale was on the table. That’s the part most owners miss. Exit preparation isn’t a pre-sale checklist. It’s a business improvement discipline, and it pays off whether or not you ever go to market.

Here’s why that matters, whatever sector you’re in.

Your data already exists, start using it properly

Every business generates data. Sales figures, job costs, customer records, it’s all there. The trouble is, most of it sits in different systems and never makes it into a proper board-level view of the business. A buyer will want real-time visibility of revenue per client, margin per job, and where the profit actually comes from. Build that visibility for yourself now, and you’ll make sharper decisions years before any sale conversation starts. Plenty of owners have no real way of checking which parts of their business are actually profitable. That’s a must fix. And there’s more.

Recurring revenue is your strength, so protect it properly.

If you’ve got contracted or repeat income, retainers, subscriptions, service agreements, long-standing clients, that’s a genuine advantage.Making sure your contracts are legally water tight is vital , ensuring all clients are on the same contract with any variation clearly signed by both parties. I see some companies where the contract is an email from the customer agreeing to the terms in a previous email!!! That’s just not good enough.

 A handful of large clients can quietly become a disproportionate share of turnover, and a sophisticated buyer, or a sharp-eyed bank, will price that concentration risk in immediately. Diversifying and solidifying your client base isn’t just an exit task. It’s basic resilience.

Reduce dependency on key people

Many small and medium businesses are still built around two or three people who hold the relationships, the know-how, and the customer trust. Often that person is you. That’s a single point of failure, and it’s one of the first things due diligence exposes. Documented processes, cross-trained staff, and knowledge that lives in your systems rather than in someone’s head make the business less fragile, not just more attractive to a future buyer, but easier to run, easier to delegate, and easier to take a holiday from.

Margin discipline beats volume chasing.

It’s tempting to chase turnover to make the business look bigger. But valuation, and genuine business health, tracks margin, not turnover. Know your margin by product, by service, by client, and protect it deliberately. A business with modest but well-understood margins is in a stronger position than one with impressive sales figures and thin, poorly tracked profitability.

It’s protection against more than just a sale.

Illness, a sudden change in personal circumstances, a key supplier relationship ending, an economic shock to a major client’s sector, none of these require you to be planning an exit, but all of them are far less dangerous to a business that doesn’t depend entirely on its owner. Building exit-readiness is, in practice, building resilience against everything else too.

It keeps your options open.

Maybe you want to pass the business to family. Maybe you want to bring in investment to grow faster. Maybe someone approaches you with an offer you weren’t expecting. Every one of those conversations goes better from a position of strength, clean numbers, low key-person dependency, a credible growth story, rather than from a position of being caught out. You don’t have to know which path you’ll take. You just have to not close any of them off by neglecting the basics.

Here’s the paradox I see most often with clients: the better you build a business to sell, the more you sometimes find you don’t want to. It becomes more profitable, less stressful, and more enjoyable to run. Whether that means you exit in three years, hand it to your children, or simply keep building something stronger for the next decade, the work is the same. Start it well before you need to.