For SaaS, e-commerce & digital-service founders
You count revenue.
A buyer counts risk.
A buyer never pays for what your business earns today. They pay for how certain they are it will keep earning after you walk out. I run the same diligence a buyer will run, before they do, and hand you the fix list, ranked by what each fix is worth at the sale.
Free · Scored across 5 domains · Top-3 gaps priced in multiple terms
Buyer-Confidence Scorecard · sample
The core mechanic
Every fact a buyer finds moves in one of two directions.
Toward certainty, and the multiple goes up. Or toward doubt, and the price does not just fall, it changes shape: earn-outs, escrow, seller notes, or no deal at all.
Toward certainty · multiple up
- Recurring revenue with retention a buyer can verify, not adjectives
- Accrual books, monthly close, a clean normalised-EBITDA bridge
- No customer above 15% of revenue
- Two or more acquisition channels that run without your face
- Repeat purchase cohorts that hold up without discounting
- A second layer of management, so the business survives your holiday
Toward doubt · repricing, earn-out, escrow
- One customer at 20 to 30% of revenue, a built-in discount
- Cash-basis books with the owner’s life tangled into the P&L
- 100% of leads from one ad platform or one marketplace
- Code written by contractors who never signed an IP assignment
- One supplier, one 3PL, a marketplace account that may not transfer
- Founder = sales + product + support. The buyer is buying a job.
The Exit-Readiness Teardown
One examination. Six domains. Scored like a buyer scores.
The full method is public: every domain, every check, every score definition. The value is in running the examination on your real data, not in the secrecy.
DOMAIN 0
Market & timing
Which way is the tide running? Rates, buyer appetite, sector multiples: the ceiling on any price.
DOMAIN 1
Quality of earnings
Are the profits real, recurring and clean, or an illusion that evaporates under accrual accounting?
DOMAIN 2
Revenue & concentration
Would revenue survive losing the biggest customer, or the founder’s relationships?
DOMAIN 3
Demand engine
Is growth efficient and diversified, or bought, fragile, and riding on one channel?
DOMAIN 4
Operations & IP
Does the business run as a system, or on heroics, tribal knowledge, and unowned code?
DOMAIN 5
Owner-dependence
Can it run and grow without you? The single biggest destroyer of private-company value.
A buyer never pays for what a business earns today. They pay for how certain they are it will keep earning after the founder walks out.
The value ladder
Start where you are. Each step de-risks the next.
The audit exists so neither of us commits to a two-year engagement on a guess.
01
Exit-Readiness Assessment
Self-serve, three minutes. Your score across the five domains, and your top three gaps, each priced in multiple terms.
Free · 3 min
02
Exit-Readiness Audit
The full teardown on your real data: Buyer-Confidence scorecard, risk register, and a roadmap sequenced by return on value drivers.
Fixed fee · ~2 weeks
03
Scale-to-Exit Advisory
Executing the roadmap together: deal-killers first, then the value drivers. A handful of clients at a time.
Retainer · 12–24 months
04
Sell-Side Mandate
When the business is ready and the window is right, running the process to a cross-border buyer pool.
Success fee
Proof, in public
Watch the same diligence happen to someone else.
Public companies publish what private owners hide, so I run the full examination on them, on the record. The teardown is the audit, demonstrated. Only the data changes.
SaaS · Nordic CRM · listed micro-cap
Upsales: a founder exit, engineered in public
After 23 years the founder-CEO hands over, on the record: successor named ahead, sell-down locked up, the moonshot spun off. Q1 revenue grew 13% while ARR grew 5.6%, and that gap is the diligence question.
Content & affiliate · iGaming · listed micro-cap
Raketech: when the channel owns you
FY 2025 revenue down 47.4% to €27.0M, and a market cap near a quarter of it. Nothing broke inside the company. Google re-weighted trust, the rankings left, and half the revenue followed them out.
The practitioner
Zhivko Stoychev
Mid-market M&A advisor. I spend my weeks inside real deals and real buyer conversations, and the teardowns you see here use the same examination I run when money is actually moving. Based in Burgas, Bulgaria. My clients are wherever their businesses are: London, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin. Online founders hire remote advisors. I sell businesses the same way.
The timing pillar · monthly
The EU Online M&A Outlook
Monthly. Where multiples sit, who is buying in your size band, and which way the tide is running: the same context layer that opens every audit.
- Euro-area inflation at 2.8% while bond yields rise. What the divergence does to the cost of capital, and to the ceiling on your multiple.
- Which buyer type is paying up in the €1M to €10M band this month, and what they are paying for.
- The platform layer: June’s core update repriced one content niche by a full turn. Who absorbs that shock, and who passes it on.
One email per month with the issue. Nothing else. Unsubscribe any time.
Match My Profit · Monthly
July 2026:
The buyer’s market that isn’t
Three minutes. Five domains. Your score.
The assessment shows you what a buyer would flag first, and what each flag costs you in multiple terms. Fix list included. No call required.