The standard buyers grade you against.
Buyers pay less for a business that needs its owner. They call it the owner discount, and it costs trade contractors millions at closing.
Most owners only learn how a buyer sees their company once they are in diligence — too late to fix anything. The Readiness Standard moves that verdict years earlier. It scores the same five pillars a buyer scores, in dollars, so you can close the gaps while you still have time, not defend them under pressure at the table.
Owner Dependence
How much revenue rides on you personally — the deals you source, the relationships only you hold, the quotes only you can close.
Buyers check who owns the top accounts, whether your name is on the big relationships, and what happens to the pipeline the day you stop selling.
Pipeline Predictability
Whether the next quarter of work is visible and tracked, or a scramble that lives in your head.
Buyers look for staged, covered pipeline against target, consistent win rates, and a next step on every open deal — not gut-feel forecasts.
Customer Concentration
How much of your revenue depends on one or two accounts that could walk.
Buyers measure your largest customer and top-five share. The more revenue sits in a handful of relationships, the more they discount for the risk.
Revenue Quality
How much of your revenue repeats instead of starting from zero every bid.
Buyers value recurring and repeat revenue, healthy margins, and clean collections over one-off project work they have to keep re-winning.
Marketing System Maturity
Whether leads come from a system the company owns, or from you and word of mouth.
Buyers check for diverse lead sources, active nurture, and a review engine — proof the company can grow without heroic effort from the owner.
The five pillars roll up into one composite from 0 to 100. Each band maps to the multiple range buyers tend to pay for trade contractors doing $5M to $50M. Move up a band and the math on your closing table changes.