Being “transaction ready” means your business is prepared, credible, and optimised to attract the best price, favourable terms, and swift deal execution. At Gravitate, we help business owners ready themselves financially, operationally and legally.
Transaction readiness is the comprehensive preparation of a business for a significant financial event, such as a sale or merger, to maximise its valuation and ensure a smooth, timely transaction.
But it isn’t just for businesses with imminent exits. It also adds value whenever you’re aiming to maximise flexibility, reduce risk, or raise capital. Common triggers include:
We recommend starting as early as possible; this gives you more time to close the gaps and avoid last-minute cost reductions in value.
At Gravitate Corporate Finance, we approach transaction readiness holistically. This means examining and anticipating what potential buyers or investors will scrutinise and where the key risk areas are that could reduce your deal leverage.
Contact UsWe will review your historical financials in depth. We will correct and explain irregularities, normalise owner benefits, ensuring consistent accounting policies.
We can assess your contracts (customers, suppliers, leases, etc.), key dependencies (customers, staff, suppliers), internal controls, IT systems and overall risk management processes and controls.
We will check your compliance, ownership structures, IP status, tax issues, employee agreements, warranties, liabilities and any other areas of potential risk.
We will help you identify and highlight what makes your business attractive, including margins, growth, defensibility and scalability. This means you can build a narrative buyers believe.
We will model different deal types (such as asset vs share sale, earn outs, deferred consideration, etc.) as well as tax implications, impact on timing, and negotiation levers.
We will help you prepare and satisfy due diligence by building a data room, assembling documents, ensuring transparency, and stress-testing queries that buyers are likely to ask.
Our approach prioritises fixes: what do right now and what can wait until later. We focus on what provides the greatest return in perceived buyer risk, or what mitigates the biggest negotiation threats to you and your deal.
If you have a deal on the horizon, ideally 12-36 months before you plan to sell or seek investment. The earlier you begin, the more value you can preserve and the more smoothly the deal process will run. If you start too late, issues can force rushed fixes, which often cost more or still leave risks unaddressed.
However, the principles of transaction readiness are great to have in place at all times for financial resilience and compliance matters, even if there are no deals pending.
Some of the usual suspects are: messy or inconsistent financial records; un-documented contracts; over-reliance on one or two customers or key staff; tax or compliance liabilities; unclear ownership or IP arrangements; weak operational controls; unrealistic growth projections.
It depends on buyer expectations and the size/type of your business. For many private equity or institutional buyers, statutory/audited (or at least reviewed) financials raise confidence.
Even if not required, having clean, credible financials with proper supporting documentation will significantly speed up the process and reduce negotiation friction. Having management accounts that have very few changes to finalised statutory accounts helps immensely in the due diligence process.
We look at metrics that matter in your industry: revenue growth, margin trends, recurring revenues, customer concentration, asset ownership (IP, property), operational leverage, strength of management team, and defensibility factors like barriers to entry or market niche. We also consider external market multiples and recent comparable transactions.
Costs vary greatly depending how many gaps there are. If your business is well run already, the work might be modest (legal reviews, contract documentation, minor financial clean ups). If there are significant risks or missing documentation, more time and external advisory may be required.
Absolutely. Even absent a sale, the discipline of transaction readiness improves performance, risk management, and flexibility. It helps you run cleaner operations, have sharper growth planning, and be ready for opportunities. Many companies find they reap benefits even without ever going through a sale process.
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