Exit readiness
Before you sell, every cost you take out is worth a multiple of itself.
If a sale is on the horizon, AI stops being just an efficiency project. Recurring cost you remove gets multiplied by your EBITDA multiple when you sell. The work that makes the business leaner is the same work that makes it worth materially more. This is that work, pointed at the exit.
The maths most founders don’t run
A cost cut is worth one times itself. At a sale, it’s worth the multiple.
Recurring cost you remove
e.g. $400k a year
Your EBITDA multiple
say 4× to 10×
Added to your sale price
$1.6m to $4m
Take a business doing $5m in revenue on a 4× EBITDA multiple. Strip $400k of recurring cost out with AI and you haven’t just saved $400k. You’ve added roughly $1.6m to what the business sells for. On a 10× multiple it’s $4m. The saving is worth having on its own. At the table, it’s worth several times that.
Multiples vary by sector, size and buyer, so treat the numbers above as the mechanism, not a promise. The direction is the reliable part: cost you take out before a sale lands in the price.
Who this is for
Founders 12 to 24 months from a sale. Or steering toward one.
Profitable, founder-led, and at the point where the value of the business and the dependence on you are the same problem. A buyer pays up for a business that runs without the founder in it. They pay down, hard, for one that doesn’t.
Most of what we’d build points straight at that gap: owner-independence, documented processes, clean operations, margin that holds when you step back. The leaner, less founder-dependent version of your business is also the one worth more.
The cleanest businesses sell for the most. AI is one of the fastest ways to get clean.
What we actually do
It’s the transformation engagement, aimed at the valuation.
Same audit, same build, same training. The difference is what the roadmap gets prioritised against: owner-independence, margin, documented and automated processes that hold up under diligence, recurring revenue that doesn’t wobble when you leave the room.
If a sale isn’t on the table, this is just good business. If it is, it’s the highest-leverage version of it, because every improvement gets counted twice: once in the running of the business, once in the price.
Why me
I’ve been on the selling side of this.
I built and ran Oh Crap for nine years, sold 58 million bags, and exited the business. Six years on a board on top of that. I read a P&L and a balance sheet, I know what a buyer’s accountants go digging for, and I know how much an owner-dependent business gets marked down.
The cost saving is the easy part to explain. The bit founders miss is that the same work changes what the business is worth. That’s the seat I’m building from.
Henry Reith
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- Designed for 10 to 200 staff service businesses
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