Thought starter
Your plan is the buyer's first test
When a business goes to market, the buyer's advisers first take the plan apart. They lay it against three years of history and against the market it claims to grow in. Most plans fail that test in the first week. The failure is rarely dishonesty. The plan was written as a number, and nobody built it from where the growth would come from.
Our seller grid asks it as one question: does our plan follow from our record? The lowest answer is "the plan's growth bears no relationship to what we have delivered, and we cannot say what changed." The next one up is more common. "The plan outruns our run-rate, and the explanation is the initiatives, not the drivers."
Where plans come from
A sale plan is usually written in the weeks before a process. The people writing it know the business best. They want the highest price for it, and that is their job. But it gives the document a particular shape.
The base year is the best recent year, because that is the one everyone remembers. The growth rate is what the business believes it can do: last year plus a few points.
Initiatives fill the gap between the two. New territories, a price rise, a product not yet launched. Each is real as an idea. None has a line in the accounts yet.
The plan is missing the ground it should stand on. How fast is the market growing, segment by segment? Is the business gaining share, and from whom? Which customers will buy more, and why? Which cost lines will fall, and what makes them fall?
A plan built from those answers can be checked. A plan built from last year cannot.
What the buyer's advisers do with it
They leave the story alone and rebuild the number.
They split three years of revenue and profit into drivers. Volume, price, mix, customers won and lost, sites opened and closed. They test the base year for anything that will not repeat.
They set the plan's growth beside the market's. Where the plan grows faster, they ask which competitor the share comes from, and why it would move now. Where costs fall, they ask which line, and what changed. Then they price the business on the plan they believe.
In our experience across engagements, that rebuild is where the value moves. In one consumer-health business, a strong final year had become the forecast base. Re-basing it took a material slice off the growth rate before anything else was discussed.
A venue operator's roll-out plan was tested bottom-up against the sites available. It came back at roughly half of management's figure. A regional care provider's share-growth case failed a fair-share test. The same exercise named the contracts most at risk of reverting.
In each case the sellers were surprised. In none of them was the plan dishonest.
The pattern is common enough to describe in a line: a good story, with a plan that starts where the record stops. The first question from a buyer's advisers reprices everything after it. Our seller check would read that business as not yet ready, and say which proofs are missing.
Prove the growth, three ways
The row is scored on evidence. The evidence is the same whether you build it or the buyer does. The difference is who holds the pen, and when. Here are three proofs, in the order a buyer looks for them.
Prove the plan comes from somewhere. Last year plus three per cent comes from nowhere. Build the plan from the market and the business.
Market growth by segment, from a source you can name. Share, and the competitor it comes from. The customers who will buy more, named where the business is concentrated. The cost lines that fall, and the reason each one falls.
Then bridge the plan to the last three years, driver by driver. Test the base year for anything that will not repeat. Every step above the run-rate gets a cause a buyer can check.
The top answer on the row describes the result. "The bridge sits in the data room, built the way a buyer's advisers would build it, and the first steps above the run-rate are already in the numbers."
Prove you have done it before. The cheapest evidence is the last plan you wrote, laid against what happened. If the business set targets three years ago and hit them, that record belongs in the data room next to the bridge. If it missed them and can say exactly why, that counts too.
It answers the buyer's first question about management. Has this team ever turned a plan into numbers? The grid's lowest answer on that row is "no record of setting a strategy and delivering it, no pilot of the growth we are selling."
Many good businesses sit there. They can deliver. Nobody kept score.
Prove you are doing it now. Take the two or three initiatives that carry most of the plan. Start each one this quarter, at a scale you can run.
One new territory. One product line. One price move on one segment. Measure it tightly enough that the result shows in the run-rate. The working rule is two quarters of attributable result before the process opens.
A pilot does not have to prove the whole number. It proves two things a buyer cannot get any other way. The mechanism works in this business. This team can execute it.
An initiative with a pilot behind it is the seller's evidence, and the buyer pays for it in the price. An initiative that begins after completion is the buyer's upside. They will price it as their own.
Why this starts a year early
The bridge takes weeks. The proofs take longer. If the plan does not follow from the record, a better plan will not fix it. A year of the record starting to look like the plan will.
The first territory open. The price rise holding. The churn reason-coded and falling. Those proofs take longest, so start them first.
Owners often ask when to begin preparing for a sale. The honest answer from this row: while you can still change the record as well as the forecast.
Updated 2026-09-26.