Thinking about selling in the next one to three years? The biggest thing you can do for your valuation is get the business out of your head and into systems a buyer can trust. That's what we build.
Working Scotland-wide: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee.
Scored across ten areas, with a prioritised gap list. This is what your audit delivers.
Most owner-managed businesses run brilliantly, right up until you ask how. The supplier deals live in your head. The pricing logic lives in your head. Two or three key people hold everything else, and none of it's written down.
You know it works. But a buyer can't buy what they can't see. They call it key-man risk, and they punish it: chipped offers, dragged-out due diligence, earn-outs that keep you tied to the desk for years after the sale. Sometimes the deal just quietly dies.
None of that reflects the quality of your business. It reflects the paperwork. And unlike your customer base or your margins, the paperwork is completely fixable in a year.
Buyers don't pay for potential. They pay for proof.
Not a lever-arch file of dusty procedures. A working set of documents that shows exactly how your business runs, and proves it runs without you.
Every core process, written down the way it actually happens. Sales, delivery, finance, the lot. Built from interviews, not blank templates.
One-glance visual maps of how work flows through the business. Due diligence teams love these, because they answer questions before they're asked.
Every person, supplier and system the business leans on, with the risk flagged and a plan against each one. Key-man risk, named and managed.
Your documents organised the way an acquirer's advisors expect to find them. Fast answers, no midnight scrambling when the requests start.
How it's built: structured interviews with you and your key people, recorded, transcribed and processed through our documentation pipeline. You talk, we write. Nobody on your team has to author a single procedure.
A site visit or remote review, a structured owner interview, and a full systems inventory. You get a scored readiness report across ten areas, plus a prioritised gap list. Useful on its own, even if you stop here.
We scope the programme from your audit results: what to fix, in what order, at a fixed price. No day rates, no scope creep. Your audit fee comes off the total.
Interviews with you and your key staff, turned into the full portfolio: SOPs, process maps, dependency register, data room. We finish by re-scoring you, so you can see the movement.
The audit is designed to pay for itself: even if you go no further, you'll know exactly where a buyer would chip your price, and what to fix first.
I'm Colin Gray. I spent fifteen years building The Podcast Host from a one-man blog into one of the world's biggest podcasting resources, alongside a software product that passed $1M in annual revenue. In 2025, I sold it.
So I've been through due diligence from the seller's chair: the document requests, the questions about who does what, the sharp focus on whether the thing survives without the founder. The businesses that sail through that process are the ones that wrote everything down first. Mine did, and it's a big part of why the deal closed. I now spend my time helping Scottish owners get there before a buyer starts asking. (My PhD's in education, which turns out to be surprisingly useful for teaching a business to explain itself.)
Colin Gray, Founder
If you advise owner-managers who are two or three years from exit, readiness is the gap between the valuation they want and the offer they'll get. We work alongside you, not around you: you keep the client relationship and the financial work, we handle the operational documentation. Ask us for a referral pack.
It's the sweet spot. Documentation takes months to build and a year or more to bed in, and buyers want to see systems that have been running, not systems finished the week before the sale memorandum went out. Start now and the work is invisible by the time anyone's doing diligence. Start late and it looks like what it is: a rush job.
Then you've just had the cheapest bad news you'll ever get. Far better you find it now than a buyer finds it in due diligence, where every gap has a price attached. The report comes with a prioritised gap list, so a horror show simply becomes a work plan.
Owner-managed Scottish businesses where the owner is still central to how things run. We've seen it across trades, hospitality, manufacturing and services: the sector matters far less than the dependency. If the business would wobble without you for a month, this is for you.
Both work. A site visit is ideal for the audit, and Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee are all easy reach. But the whole process, interviews included, runs perfectly well remotely, so location's never a blocker.
A 20-minute call. No pitch deck, no obligation. We'll talk about your timeline and whether an audit is worth your money. If it isn't, I'll say so.
Book an intro call