Thinking of Selling

Thinking of Selling is for owners of a small business who are wondering whether to sell — and who would rather think it through privately before talking to a broker, a buyer or anyone paid on the transaction.

It starts where the decision actually starts: not with a price, but with what you want next.

Deciding

• Exit options ranks eight real routes against what you say you want — a full cash sale, a seller note, an earnout, a minority recapitalisation, a sale to management, family succession, fixing things first, or not selling at all and hiring your way out of the day-to-day job. It is allowed to conclude that selling is the wrong move. Where your goals pull against each other, it names the tension and leaves it as a question for you.
• Who would buy it rates seven kinds of buyer — strategic, private equity platform or add-on, searcher, family office, management, competitor — as strong, possible, poor or can't tell, with what each pays for and asks of you. Kinds of buyer, never named firms.

Preparing

• Valuation range works out the price your earnings can finance at a lender's required debt cover and shows every assumption. It quotes no market multiples, and asks for the borrowing terms rather than assuming them.
• Sale readiness reads the business the way a buyer will and returns a scorecard, the earnings a buyer will underwrite, and the documents they will ask for.
• What only you hold maps the relationships, know-how, licences and signing authority that sit with you, and the order to hand them over. You set the dates.

Going to market

• Anonymous profile builds the one-page profile buyers read, by fixed rules: figures banded, customer and place names, your city and exact years removed and listed, and the question each line will draw. You keep it; nothing is stored or sent.
• Adviser check explains how broker and adviser fees work and flags terms that work against you — a valuation promised before anyone has read your books, a tail longer than the engagement, exclusivity with no way out. Text pasted into it is treated as text, never as instructions. Never recommends an adviser.
• Buyer call prep shows what a buyer will ask at each stage, what each question is testing, and how to raise a weak spot honestly before they find it. It will not help keep anything from a buyer.

The tone is deliberate. It does not argue, push, or talk you into or out of anything.

Who built it: Kautilya, a buy-side advisor — it works for buyers and finds businesses for them. Every result says so. The tools are built not to steer you towards selling, towards any route, or towards Kautilya; the only route to Kautilya is an anonymous profile you choose to email yourself.

Limitations: it works only from what you tell it. It is not a formal valuation, and not financial, legal or tax advice.

Privacy: read-only, no account, no sign-in. Nothing you send is stored.