I was speaking recently with a business owner who'd just closed a deal in eight weeks from the time diligence started. No retrade on value. No last-minute surprises. The buyer commented it was one of the smoothest processes they'd experienced.
The business wasn't exceptional by revenue. It wasn't growing at a remarkable pace. What it had was something buyers in 2026 are actively hunting for and not always finding: it looked exactly the way a prepared seller should look.
The financials were current and clean. The KPIs were documented. The operations didn't depend on the owner being in the room. When the buyer asked a question, the answer was already organized — management spent its time answering strategic questions instead of hunting for three-year-old records in a filing cabinet.
Eight weeks from diligence to close. In today's market, that's remarkable.
What buyers are actually looking for right now
The Florida CFO Group, working with sellers across multiple industries, put it plainly in a recent piece: today's buyers are looking beyond revenue growth and EBITDA. They want confidence, visibility, and predictability. Most importantly, they want evidence that the business can continue to perform after the transaction closes.
That last part is the one most owners miss. A buyer isn't buying your history. They're buying their future. And if your business looks like it runs because of you — your relationships, your knowledge, your daily presence — they're not buying a business. They're buying a job. And they'll price it accordingly.
Higher interest rates have raised the cost of capital. Economic uncertainty has made future performance harder to predict. As a result, buyers are doing harder diligence, asking harder questions, and challenging assumptions that would have sailed through without debate a few years ago. The businesses getting rewarded are the ones that prepared for this environment — not the ones that hoped they wouldn't have to.
The contrast nobody talks about
For every deal that closes in eight weeks, there's another that drags for six months, sees a price retrade in the final stretch, and closes — if it closes at all — on terms the owner didn't expect.
The difference isn't usually the business. It's the preparation. And preparation isn't something you do in the 90 days before going to market. It's a two-to-three-year process of building the kind of business a buyer can trust.
I am not suggesting you need to be in sale mode right now. I am suggesting that the owners who exit well started thinking about this before they needed to. They built clean financials, documented their operations, reduced their own centrality to the business, and showed up to diligence with something real — not a story.
Where to start
The question isn't whether your business is good. Most of the businesses I work with are genuinely good. The question is whether it's legible to a buyer — whether the evidence of its goodness is visible, organized, and verifiable.
If you've never looked at your business through a buyer's eyes, that's a useful place to start. Give me a call. It's a short conversation, and it tends to surface a few things worth knowing.