BA’s Business Exit Ready Services

BA’s Business Exit Ready advisory team has years of hands-on experience providing exit planning and business value advisory services to our clients.

Nate Isabelle, CPA, Sean Burke, EA, and John Burke, CPA, collectively have over 50 Years of experience helping guide over $200 Million In Successful Business Exits.

If you’re looking to phase down and sell or exit your business in the next 3-7 years, the decisions you make today will determine if you sell for top dollar or if you leave money on the table.

If you are a business owner who:

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Has a company generating $2-12 million in annual revenue
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Planning to retire or transition your business within the next 3-7 years
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Your current CPA is too busy and not focused on helping you make your business more valuable

Then BA’s Business Exit Ready Services will help you make the right decisions today that will set you and your business up to sell.

Many business owners have spent 15 to 30 years building their business by rolling up their sleeves and working hard to build something they’re genuinely proud of.

Most business owners discover too late that their “valuable” business is actually worth 30-40% less than expected because they were calculating their business value based on an ideal scenario.

The reality is, valuations are often reduced by messy financials, poor systems, lack of growth, heavy customer concentration, owner dependency, and more. Wouldn’t it be helpful to identify where your business’s valuation, key growth opportunities, and risk factors stand today, allowing you to operate from a position of strength at an eventual sale or transition?

Like most entrepreneurs, your business is your most valuable asset.

You might be thinking: “I’m not ready to sell for at least 5 years.”

Perfect! That’s exactly when you need to start planning. Business owners who command premium prices start preparing 3-7 years before their exit.

We used our Business Exit Ready Services to help one of our long-term distribution clients recently sell to private equity for $28 million. The buyers specifically commented that due diligence was easy, given the quality and reliability of their financials.

How Our Transaction Advisory Services Protect and Create Value

We help you move through a transaction from a position of strength, not reaction. Our work focuses on the issues that buyers, lenders, and investors care about most—and the ones that tend to derail deals.

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Due Diligence Defense
Whether you’re on the buy side or sell side, diligence is intense. We manage financial due diligence services by anticipating questions, organizing data, and addressing concerns before they escalate. This reduces friction, shortens timelines, and keeps negotiations focused on value rather than cleanup.
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Transaction Structuring & Tax Strategy

It’s not what you sell for—it’s what you keep. Strategy matters more than headline price. Our tax and advisory services are integrated early, helping you evaluate asset vs. stock sales, working capital adjustments in M&A, and strategies for reducing tax liability when selling a business. All so you can maximize what you keep.

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Objective Valuation Support

When buyers challenge numbers, evidence is what wins. We provide the financial reporting and analysis needed to support valuation assumptions, bridge gaps in expectations, and keep discussions grounded in data.

BA’s Exit Ready Services Process

Step 1: The Financial Foundation

We make sure your financial systems are set up to help you make decisions.

We overhaul your QuickBooks transactions, implement automated bank feeds, and deliver reliable monthly P&Ls with insights that allow you to make great decisions today that will allow you to exit tomorrow.

If your books are a mess, buyers assume your business is messy.

They can’t separate the two.

And getting organized needs to start now, so you’re not scrambling during due diligence.
We’ve seen businesses get 30-40% lower offers simply because their financial reporting couldn’t clearly demonstrate profitability trends, cash flow patterns, and growth metrics over a long period of time.

When buyers see clean, consistent, professional financial reporting, they think: “This is a well-run business. These people know what they’re doing.”

That’s the difference between getting a “discount” and getting a “premium”.

We’ve helped one of our law firm clients prepare for exit by providing them with timely and reliable monthly P&Ls with a clear picture of their trailing and historical Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation & Amortization or “EBITDA” growth metrics.

Step 2: Your Customized Tax Savings Strategy

Every dollar you overpay in taxes is a dollar that you can’t invest in your business to make it more valuable.

We analyze your last three years of tax returns, identify every missed opportunity, and implement tax savings strategies moving forward that could create a significant increase in cash flow.

That could mean an extra $50,000 to $500,000 over the next several years that you could use to grow your business as you’re preparing to exit.

Implementing these types of tax savings strategies has saved one of our medical services clients over $200,000 in just the past 2 years.

Step 3: Our Valuation Acceleration Protocol

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Most business owners think revenue growth is all that matters. But buyers evaluate dozens of factors: recurring revenue, customer concentration, market position, profit margin, EBITDA, industry-specific multiples, and more.

Using our customized valuation assessment tool, we establish your current baseline value and create a specific roadmap to hit your desired valuation over your transition timeline.

We use this assessment tool to evaluate all these factors, show you exactly where you stand today, and give you a specific roadmap to maximize each value driver.

When the time comes, you know that you have made every right decision to get the cash value that you want out of the business when you make that transition.

We’ve worked closely with many of our clients to help them move their business valuation up by over $2 million.

Let’s Talk About Your Exit Readiness

Our preliminary Exit Ready discovery meeting is at no charge and includes:

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Review your current Earnings or EBITDA
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Listening to what you want the timeline for your transition to look like over the next 3-7 years.
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Telling you what steps you need to focus on to maximize value and reach your goal.

We’ll help analyze your specific situation and give you actionable insights you can use, whether you choose to work with us or not.

Click the button below to book your Business Exit Ready discovery meeting today!

FAQs

What is a Net Working Capital (NWC) Peg?
The NWC Peg is a target level of working capital you must leave in the business at closing. We help you negotiate a favorable peg so you don’t inadvertently hand over extra cash to the buyer.
What are common EBITDA add-backs?
Common add-backs include owner’s salary above market rate, personal travel/auto expenses, one-time legal fees, and non-recurring startup costs for new product lines. Identifying these effectively increases the ‘normalized’ profit of your business.
How far in advance should I prepare for a sale?
Ideally 3-7 years before your exit. Early preparation allows time to address accounting issues, strengthen financial reporting, and optimize tax outcomes, which helps reduce the risk of late-stage repricing.
What’s the difference between financial due diligence vs. audit?
An audit verifies compliance with accounting standards. Financial due diligence examines the drivers behind the numbers, like customer concentration, margins, working capital, and risks tied directly to valuation.
Can transaction advisory services really increase valuation?
Yes. By identifying and supporting legitimate add-backs, clarifying normalized earnings, and reducing perceived risk, we help justify stronger valuation multiples.

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