Owner Readiness
What is prompting you to explore a sale, your timeline, and how aligned all decision-makers are on the outcome.
Most owners have never had their business looked at the way a buyer looks at it. Fifteen questions, four categories, sixty seconds. You get an honest read on where you actually stand before it ever costs you anything at a negotiating table.
Business owners spend years or decades inside their companies. They know every customer, every product line, every strength, and every weakness they have learned to work around.
Buyers do not have that context. They see a set of numbers, a set of risks, and a set of dependencies. Then they decide whether the business is worth paying for, and how much.
The gap between how an owner sees the business and how a buyer sees it is often the difference between a life-changing outcome and a disappointing one. Closing that gap is the entire work of preparing a business for sale.
Each category is an area buyers evaluate carefully during due diligence, and where weaknesses translate directly into lower offers, retrade attempts, or failed deals.
What is prompting you to explore a sale, your timeline, and how aligned all decision-makers are on the outcome.
How the business operates day to day, and how dependent it is on you personally. Owner-dependence is the most common reason offers come in below expectations.
How established the business is, the strength of your customer base, and how it compares to competitors.
A high-level view of profitability, financial clarity, and how closely performance is tracked.
Every owner who has thought about selling has thought about the moment an employee, a customer, or a competitor finds out before they were ready.
Your business is presented to the market anonymously through a blind teaser: industry, geography, and financial highlights only. Buyers are pre-qualified before they are told anything, and they sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before receiving your Confidential Information Memorandum.
In 18 years, we have had zero confidentiality breaches.
When I decided to sell, my biggest fear was that my employees would find out before I was ready to tell them. Dwayne and the OBB team managed the entire process with a level of discretion I didn't think was possible. Not one of my employees, customers, or competitors knew the business was for sale until I chose to tell them. That's rare.
Founder-led and family-owned businesses in Ontario, typically generating $5 million to $100 million or more in annual revenue, in manufacturing, construction, industrial services, transportation, distribution, specialty trades, and business services.
Owners considering a sale within the next one to five years who want strategic clarity now.
A published range is a guideline, not a wall. Some of the best businesses we have represented fell just outside our typical criteria.
For businesses below the full advisory range, the Done-For-You Business Sale Program offers a structured, streamlined sale process at a service level appropriate for the transaction. Same discipline. Same confidentiality.
Confidential. Free. Instant results across all four categories, with a plain-language read on where the business is strong and where it has work to do.
No. The assessment is free and confidential, and you receive your results directly. Most of our best client relationships begin years before a transaction.
That is the better time to take it. The weaknesses buyers discount for take time to fix. Finding them two to five years out is the difference between correcting them and absorbing them in the offer.
Value is set by the market, not by what you paid, what you built, or what you need to retire on. The assessment is a readiness benchmark, not a valuation. When you need a defensible number, our Market Value Assessment delivers one, grounded in comparable private company transactions and industry multiples.
A properly run sell-side process typically takes six to twelve months from engagement to closing. Rushed sales almost always leave value on the table.
Ontario Business Brokers is a boutique M&A advisory firm led by Dwayne M. Mitchell, a Certified Business Intermediary with over 18 years of M&A advisory experience. We work exclusively for sellers. We do not represent buyers.
No obligation. No pressure. Complete confidentiality. If we are the right firm for you, we will know within one conversation. If we are not, we will tell you honestly.