What's your business worth?

The headline number is not what lands in your pocket

A valuation starts with your adjusted earnings and applies a multiple. That gives the value of the trading business itself, what dealmakers call the enterprise value. It is not your cheque. Here is the bridge from one to the other:

The debt side is dollar-for-dollar: whatever the business owes at settlement - loans, equipment finance, tax owing, staff entitlements built up - comes off your price, because the buyer inherits it. On the plus side, genuinely spare cash adds back (or you clear it out as a dividend before completion), and property the company owns is priced as real estate alongside the business, often kept and leased back, rather than squeezed into a trading multiple. Vehicles and equipment the business needs to operate add nothing on top - they are part of what makes the earnings possible. Then the working-capital "peg": a business can't be handed over as an empty shell, so buyer and seller agree the normal level of debtors, stock and creditors it needs to run, and the price trues up in whichever direction completion day lands. And if you've borrowed from your own company over the years - your accountant will say the words "Division 7A" - those loan accounts get cleared before settlement, usually via a dividend that becomes your tax problem, not the buyer's. What remains after all of that is the equity value. That is what you actually get, and it is the number that matters.

Price and terms are two different pillars

Every deal has two levers: how much, and how it is paid. As the seller you generally get to pick one, and the buyer takes the other. Want everything on completion day? The price drops, sharply, because the risk profile just changed for the buyer and for whoever is funding them. Want the strongest price? Expect part of it paid over time, tied to the business performing as promised. Neither is wrong. But walking in demanding top price and all cash today is asking for both pillars, and experienced buyers simply walk away.

Buyers pay for what is real today

A valuation prices the business as it stands: the last verified numbers, this year's run rate. Not the average of the last ten years, not what it could do, not what it is about to do. If you are convinced big growth is coming and you want a piece of it, there is an honest structure for exactly that: an earn-out, where part of the price is paid if and when the growth actually arrives. If it arrives, you share in it. If it does not, there was nothing to share. What no serious buyer will do is pay you today for growth that has not happened yet.

Nobody writes one big cheque

It is worth saying bluntly: the buyer who hands over the full amount in one lump sum on day one almost does not exist, and when they appear, they are usually inexperienced and often fail to complete. Ask where the purchase money actually comes from and there are only four places: the buyer's own cash (almost never enough on its own), a bank, a capital partner of some kind - an investor, a fund, a family office - and you. Yes, you: whenever part of the price is paid over time, as an earn-out or delayed consideration, the business's own cash flow is funding its own purchase, which makes you a lender to the deal whether you think of it that way or not. From the local trade business changing hands to the biggest private-equity deals in the country, nearly every real transaction blends those sources: an amount on completion, then payments over time that match what the business earns. That is not buyers being tricky. It is how the maths of funding an acquisition works.

Put yourself in the buyer's shoes

The buyer is not buying your history, your hard work, or the risks you took. They are buying the business exactly as it is now, and what it will earn next. Their single biggest fear is paying for something that is not really there once the keys change hands. So real contracts carry conditions: key people staying on, key customers confirmed, supplier arrangements holding. Think through the mechanics of why. Say two key people walk a month after settlement. Revenue falls immediately. The buyer now has a crisis to manage, and the payments they owe the bank, and possibly still owe you, were sized against the old revenue. Can they make those payments? What happens to the money you are still owed if they cannot?

It is tempting to think all of that is the buyer's problem. Understand what actually happens when a seller takes that position: a sophisticated buyer does not argue. They say thanks, but no thanks, and move to the next business on their list - and there is always a next business, one where the owner is willing to share risk sensibly. Refusing to engage with the buyer's risk does not protect your price; it removes you from the market for everyone except bargain hunters. And once part of your price is paid over time, which is nearly always, the business's performance after you leave is literally your money on the line.

Your money is travelling in their truck.

Now put yourself in the bank's shoes

Whoever funds the purchase asks the same questions with even less sentiment. What happens if a major customer leaves? If the key person quits? If the owner walks out with all the relationships in their head? Lenders fund cash flow they believe will still be there after the handover. The harder your revenue is to transfer, the less anyone can borrow against it, and the deal gets done at a lower price, on heavier terms, or not at all.

And the machinery behind that decision is colder than most owners imagine. From our conversations with commercial finance brokers: banks set lending appetite right down to postcode level, and simply stop lending where their exposure is full. Serviceability margins move with policy - the buffer a loan must clear can double when credit tightens, without your business changing at all. Major lenders routinely cap commercial lending around seventy per cent of the transaction unless extra security is offered. None of that is about your business's quality - which is exactly the point. The financeable share of any deal is decided by forces neither you nor the buyer controls, so the parts you CAN control - transferable revenue, provable earnings, a business that runs without you - are what determine whether the funding stretches to your price or falls short of it.

The same logic runs through every other layer of the funding stack. A capital partner - private equity, a family office, an investor backing an operator - isn't bound by bank serviceability rules, but they underwrite the same questions with sharper pencils: what does this business return without the current owner in it, and what can we prove? They pay up for documented systems and contracted revenue, and they discount owner-dependence harder than any bank, because they're rarely planning to run the front counter themselves. And the last layer of the stack is you: every dollar of earn-out or delayed consideration is you underwriting the same bet on transferability - if the business doesn't perform once you've stepped out, the money you're still owed doesn't arrive. Every source of funds in the deal, from the bank to the capital partner to your own vendor terms, is making the identical judgement: does the value transfer? The more convincingly it does, the more of the price gets funded, the cleaner your terms, and the less of your money rides on someone else's driving.

Everyone is certain, right up until it is in the contract

Every owner is sure the team will stay, the customers are loyal, the suppliers are solid. They love it here. We have never once sat with a seller who said otherwise. And it may all be true. But watch what happens when the buyer asks to bake those certainties into the agreement: many sellers suddenly balk at the "risk". To a buyer, that hesitation is the loudest red flag in the whole process - if the people who know the business best won't stand behind its relationships, why should the person paying for them?

Here is the uncomfortable part: those things are not nice extras on top of the value. They are the value. There are sensible, well-worn ways to address and manage this risk in a deal. Avoidance is not one of them. And none of this is about pulling one over on anyone - it is about sharing risk fairly, getting a fair price, making sure your staff are looked after, and seeing the business you spent years building carry on successfully without you. The easiest way to achieve all four is to optimise the business for sale before the buyer ever shows up.

Which is exactly why the levers above matter

Read back through your results with the buyer's and the bank's eyes. A business that runs without the owner. Systems written down instead of carried in one head. Revenue spread across many customers instead of hanging off two. Every call answered, every enquiry followed up, every invoice collected, on a system anyone can operate. Those are not just nice operational wins. They are what makes a business safely buyable and safely fundable, and that shows up in both pillars: a stronger price, and better terms. It is the difference between a buyer discounting you for risk and a bank leaning in.

That is the quiet logic behind everything OperatorIQ sets up. The same fixes that save you time and money today are the ones that make the eventual cheque bigger and the terms cleaner, whenever that day comes. And even if that day never comes, they are the same fixes that put more into cash at bank, and ultimately your wallet, every month in between.

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General information only, not financial, legal or valuation advice. Every deal is different; get your own advisers before signing anything.

Who can actually buy your business?

Here is the question almost nobody asks an owner, and it decides everything: if you handed over the keys tomorrow, what exactly would the new owner be holding? If the honest answer is "my relationships, my know-how, my number in everyone's phone" - then the value walks out the door with you, and the only people who can safely buy the business are the ones who already have their own version of those things. Your competitors. And competitors buy at the lowest price of any buyer type, because they don't need most of what you built - they need your customer list, and they know nobody else is bidding.

A business where the value transfers - where the phone gets answered, the work gets done, the customers stay, whoever owns it - can be bought by anyone. An operator, an investor, a stranger with a bank behind them. And that matters for more than the price. Think about what you actually want from a sale. The money, sure. But you also want a buyer you're comfortable handing the keys to - a trusted pair of hands for the thing you've poured twenty years into. You want your staff looked after. You don't want customers and suppliers you've worked with for fifteen years left in the lurch, because those relationships mattered to you long before any deal did. The more transferable the business and the more defensible its revenue, the more buyers you get to choose between - and choice is what lets you hold out for the one who pays properly AND deserves it. Everything on your scorecard above is, in the end, about one thing: how much choice will you have?

Is it bankable? The question behind the question

Most owners think about what a buyer will pay. Few think about what the money behind the buyer - their bank or capital partner - will fund - and that is the number that actually sets the ceiling. Nearly every real buyer borrows part of the price, and the lender's test is brutally simple: will the cash flow still be there after the current owner leaves, and can we verify that from the books? Earnings that depend on you, revenue hanging off two customers, systems that live in your head, accounts that need explaining - each of those shrinks what anyone can borrow against your business. And when the funding shrinks, the price doesn't just soften. Deals go from clean offers to heavy earn-outs, from wide pools to one competitor with a low bid, from sold to relisted.

A business that isn't bankable isn't really for sale at its asking price. It just doesn't know it yet.

What listing on hope actually costs

The standard path looks like this: get a flattering appraisal (appraisals win listings - that is what they are for), list at the hopeful number, sit on the market while every serious buyer's accountant quietly finds the gaps, drop the price, relist, go stale. A stale listing is a wounded one: buyers assume something is wrong, and they are usually right. The tragedy is that most of those gaps were fixable - some in weeks - if the owner had seen them through a buyer's eyes a year earlier. We've spoken with hundreds of Australian owners, and almost all fall down on the same handful of categories. Not because the businesses are bad. Because nobody ever showed them the lens.

What we know - and what we don't

Let's be clear about something first. We are not here to tell you how to run your business, and this is not a list of things you're doing wrong. If you lay bricks, you know more about bricklaying than we ever will. Same for your clinic, your workshop, your trucks. What we know is the other side of the table: how buyers approach acquisitions, what their due diligence goes hunting for, and how their banks decide what to fund. That is the lens this whole page is written through - and conveniently, the fixes it points to are the same ones that take the daily grind off your plate and cut costs right now, because the whole premise is getting the business to run brilliantly without depending on you personally. You benefit either way, sale or no sale.

The Exit-Readiness Report

That lens is what our Exit-Readiness Report is. The tool above told you where you're at and why - no bullshit, no flattery. The report is the other half: if the tool says $2 million, the report is how you find out what stands between you and $3 million, and the structured roadmap to actually get there. Not a broker's appraisal designed to win your listing - we're not brokers and we're not after one. It takes your business through the same categories a buyer's due diligence and their financier will run, and gives you three things, in plain language: the specific gaps in your business, in the order a buyer will find them; what each one is roughly costing you in multiple terms; and the fix order - what to do first, what it takes, and what it's worth. Undeniable, because every point is the same one a buyer's side would make - you're just hearing it years earlier, while there's still time to act on it. And where the fixes need systems built - the phones, the follow-up, the documentation, the reporting - OperatorIQ can tie it all together and build them with you.

If you've spent ten, twenty, thirty years building this business, getting exit-ready might be the single most impactful thing you ever do to make sure you're properly rewarded for it. The difference is rarely small. Closing the gaps is regularly the difference between one multiple band and the next - on a typical established business, that is hundreds of thousands of dollars, and often more. It is also the difference between a deal your buyer's bank leans into and one it declines.

$4,950 +GST, flat. For businesses up to $10m revenue; larger businesses scoped individually. Includes a structured information session, the full report, and a debrief call - delivered within ten business days.

Sample pages. Every report is built on the specifics of your business.

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Bring your scorecard from above. We'll tell you, plainly, whether a full report is worth it for your situation - and if it isn't, we'll say so.

General information only, not financial, legal or valuation advice. Every business and every deal is different. Sample figures are illustrative, not from a real client.