Not what you hope they would find. Not what your instincts tell you after twenty years of running the business. What they would actually find, measured against the specific criteria that determine whether they buy, at what price, and on what terms.
Most founders cannot answer that question with any confidence. Running a business well and presenting one for acquisition are two different disciplines, and almost no one explains this until a founder is already in a process. By then it is the most expensive time to find out.
The numbers bear this out. A Wilmington Trust survey of privately-held business owners found that 58% have no transition plan of any kind. Meanwhile, the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility estimates that 6 million small and medium-sized businesses will hit the market by 2035, representing $5 trillion in enterprise value. Of SMB exits today, 92% end in closure rather than sale. Those businesses did not lack value. They lacked preparation.
In the DFW middle market right now, founders running manufacturing operations in Grand Prairie, SaaS companies out of Plano, and healthcare businesses across the Metroplex are receiving unsolicited letters of intent from coastal private equity funds. The volume of that outreach has increased. The quality has not.
According to Bain’s Global Private Equity Report 2026, PE deal activity rebounded in 2025 but the recovery was narrow. Distributions to limited partners remain stubbornly low, buyers are under pressure to demonstrate real value creation, and Bain’s own framing puts it plainly: “12 is the new 5” — meaning institutional buyers now demand faster EBITDA growth. The two most common obstacles to completed deals, per Bain’s GP survey, were inflated seller expectations and diligence red flags, specifically poor earnings quality and customer churn.
Unsolicited LOIs are probes, not opportunities. A fund sends a hundred letters to find the two or three founders willing to transact quickly, at a price that reflects the buyer’s advantage. A prepared founder can evaluate that letter from a position of knowledge. An unprepared one is negotiating blind.
The Transaction Readiness Assessment is a fixed-fee, scored diagnostic across five dimensions:
Financial Clarity, Revenue Strategy, Operational Scalability, Ownership and Management, and Diligence Readiness. It produces a scored report, a prioritized action plan, and a projected enterprise value range showing what the business is worth today versus after a structured optimization period.
A valuation tells you what your business is worth at a given moment. The TRA tells you why a buyer will pay more or less than that number, and gives you enough time to do something about the gap. It is completed in weeks. It does not require a commitment to anything beyond understanding where your business stands.
The Read Out, a 90 to 120 minute working session with the founder and their advisors, is a findings-driven conversation. Referral partners are actively encouraged to attend. Some of the most productive sessions I have been part of were the ones where a founder’s CPA or M&A; attorney sat in the room and saw the scored results alongside their client.
Two dimensions produce the most consistent surprises across the engagements I have been part of. The first is Financial Clarity. Most founders have a CPA and monthly financials. What they often lack is a financial narrative that holds up under sophisticated buyer scrutiny. Consider a business whose EBITDA includes COVID-era PPP adjustments, an owner compensation package that has never been normalized to market rate, and a lease with a related party that has never been marked to market. Each item is explainable. Left unaddressed, they look like opacity. Institutional buyers reprice opacity.
In one recent engagement, a founder came to us certain his business was generating $4.2 million in EBITDA. After normalization — removing personal expenses, adjusting owner compensation, marking the related-party lease — the defensible number was $3.6 million. Against a market multiple of seven, that gap represents $4.2 million in enterprise value. Nothing was wrong. Everything simply needed to be organized for external scrutiny before it went to market.
The second is Operational Scalability. Here the question is whether the business runs when its owner steps back. Try this: imagine you take a two-week vacation, fully off the grid. When you return, what has accumulated? Which decisions stalled? Which relationships went unattended? Every answer is valuation data. Every decision that required you is a dependency a buyer will price. Buyers pay for systems, not founders.
Most founders, when they work through this honestly, find the list longer than they expected. That is not a comfortable realization. It is a useful one.