FREE EXIT PREPARATION DIAGNOSTIC
Know exactly where you stand. Before you commit to anything.
One report, delivered within 24 hours: your business scored across five categories, a transition risk grade with its consequences for deal terms and buyer financing spelled out, and a ranked list of the projects to fix first.
20-to-30-minute intake. Report by email within 24 hours. No obligation.
Most owners find out what dependency costs them at the negotiating table, or in due diligence, when the leverage is gone and there is no time left to act. Fifteen years of deal work built that pattern into this diagnostic. It tells you the same thing years earlier, while something can still be done about it.
WHAT THE DIAGNOSTIC PRODUCES
The structured opinion of an M&A advisor
The diagnostic is not a questionnaire with a score at the end. It is the structured opinion of an M&A advisor with more than fifteen years of experience selling businesses like yours — assessing where your business depends on you, what that dependency costs you at sale, and what specifically would change if it were reduced. Every finding reflects what buyers actually look for in due diligence. The framework is built on real deal experience; the analysis is specific to your business.
The diagnostic produces seven things, delivered as a single report:
Business Snapshot — how your business appears from the outside, including how prominently you appear in it.
Exiting Talent Summary — how much of the business's operating capacity walks out the door when you leave, as a percentage of total capacity.
Business Independence Score — 0 to 100 across five categories, each annotated with the specific finding from your intake that drove it.
Transition Risk Grade — a letter grade, A through D, with a plain-English account of how it affects who is able to finance the purchase, your sale price, how much of the payment is delayed until the business proves it runs without you, and how long you may have to stay on.
Ranked Task Backlog — the specific projects that would move your score most, ranked by impact and feasibility.
Preliminary Owner Responsibility Statement — what a buyer would see in your operations today, at the owner level and across the broader team, and how that picture would change.
Recommended Starting Point — if the diagnostic identifies a clear first project, it is named and briefly scoped.
This is what the report looks like.
An illustrative example. Your diagnostic report is specific to your business.
How to Begin
Your report arrives by email within 24 hours. It is free, and it obligates you to nothing. The intake takes 20 to 30 minutes. What follows is the report, not a sales sequence.
No documents are required. The intake is questions about how the business runs today — who does what, and what depends on whom.
Start now, finish later. Fill it in at your own pace.
Prefer to talk instead?
The call covers the same intake ground. Same 24-hour report delivery.
What Happens After
(1) Within 24 hours of form submission, you receive your Exit Preparation Diagnostic report by email — a specific document, not a sales call. (2) One to two days after delivery, we email you a link to book a 30-minute call to walk through the findings, if you want one. Booking is entirely up to you, and the call obligates you to nothing. (3) The report is yours to keep regardless of whether you engage.
If you engage Litefirm after the diagnostic, implementation is billed at the actual cost of the people doing the work — $5 to $7 per hour, no markup — while the engagement is on the path to selling through Synergy Business Brokers. If the business later sells through Synergy, what you paid is applied against the commission at closing. How that model works, and why, is on the pricing page.
Who the Diagnostic Is For
The diagnostic is well-suited for three types of owners.
Owners who are planning to sell within one to four years and want a clear picture of where they stand before committing to a preparation engagement.
Owners who are three to five years from a sale and want a documented baseline to build toward. Starting the preparation with a scored analysis rather than a guess changes what the first two years of work accomplish.
Owners who have already been through advisory conversations and know what needs to change, but have not found anyone who will do the work of changing it.
Referred by an advisor? If a CPA, attorney, or financial planner has referred you to Litefirm, the diagnostic is available regardless of where you are in the sale timeline. The same applies to owners who are not yet planning to sell but want an honest picture of where the business stands today.
The diagnostic is not suited for every business.
Businesses earning below $200,000 in annual owner earnings are outside the scope of what Litefirm's engagement model is built for. The economics of a multi-year preparation engagement need to be supported by the sale outcome they are designed to produce.
Businesses where the majority of customer relationships are personal to the owner and cannot be transferred to new ownership are also outside scope. The preparation work can document processes and systematize operations; it cannot relocate relationships that exist only because the owner is the person across the table. This is a structural feature of certain kinds of businesses, not a problem the preparation period can solve.
Privacy and Legal
Information submitted through the diagnostic intake is used to produce your diagnostic report. It is not used for unsolicited outreach. The full statement of how diagnostic intake data is handled appears in our Privacy Policy.
The diagnostic is free. It comes back within 24 hours. It does not obligate you to anything.