If a buyer walked through your door tomorrow, would you know — with any precision — what they would find?
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.
A Transaction Readiness Assessment is not a pitch. It is a diagnosis — and like most diagnoses, it is most useful before the symptoms become a crisis.
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.
The distance between where most founder-led businesses stand and where buyers need them to be is almost always larger than founders expect. It is also almost always closeable — given enough lead time.
The most common reaction in the Read Out is not defensiveness. It is relief. There is something clarifying about seeing the gaps named precisely, ranked by their impact on enterprise value, and organized into a sequence of actions rather than a diffuse sense that something needs to be done.
Founders who came in thinking they were twelve months from market often leave understanding they are twenty-four. That is not a failure. That is the process working.
The optimal window is 18 to 36 months before going to market. That window allows time to close the gaps the assessment identifies, build the management layer, and normalize the financial narrative.
The unsolicited LOI sitting on a Grand Prairie manufacturer's desk is not a signal that the market has come to them. It is a signal that the market is active and moving, and that founders who are positioned to respond from strength are the ones who started this work before anyone came calling.
What would it take to know, with precision, where your business stands? The TRA is completed in weeks. The Read Out is a single session. The output tells you, plainly, what a buyer will see and what to do about it. That seems like enough to start.
If you're a founder within 24 months of an exit, or receiving unsolicited interest you're not sure how to evaluate, the Transaction Readiness Assessment is the right first step. Fixed-fee, scored, and designed to show you exactly where you stand before a buyer does. Start a conversation.
Managing Partner, Lighthouse Value Partners
lighthousevaluepartners.com
A valuation tells you what your business is worth under a given methodology at a given moment. A TRA tells you why a buyer will pay more or less than that number and what to do about the gap before you go to market. The TRA is a scored diagnostic across five operational dimensions, not a financial opinion.
The assessment is completed in weeks, not months. The Read Out, a 90 to 120 minute working session with the founder and their advisors, follows shortly after. Founders leave with a scored report, a prioritized action plan, and a projected enterprise value range showing current versus post-optimization value.
Financial Clarity, Revenue Strategy, Operational Scalability, Ownership and Management, and Diligence Readiness. Each dimension is scored, weighted by its impact on enterprise value, and mapped to a specific set of actions. Most businesses have meaningful gaps in at least two.
The TRA output includes a projected enterprise value range under two scenarios: what the business would likely transact for if it went to market today, and what it could command after a structured optimization period. The gap between those two numbers is the financial case for the work, and most founders find it larger than expected.
The founder, and ideally their trusted advisors: CPA, M&A attorney, wealth manager, or any other professional involved in the exit decision. The Read Out is a findings-driven working session. Referral partners are actively encouraged to attend. The more informed the advisory team, the better the decisions that follow.
No. The TRA is useful at any stage of a founder's journey. A business that is not exit-ready today is better off knowing that now than discovering it during a live process. Many founders use the TRA as a planning tool two to three years before they intend to go to market, which is precisely the window where the findings are most actionable.