Tier I · The Structural Diagnostic
Find out what a buyer finds, while the timeline is still yours.
Twenty-five criteria across the five gates, scored against your actual records on a fixed scale. You get the scorecard, the exposure a buyer or a lender hits first, and the order to fix it in. The fee is $3,500, fixed, and the diagnostic is not delegated.
What it answers
Three questions owners are already asking at eleven at night.
What will a buyer or lender test first, and why?
Where structural transferability stands today, what the current records can support, and which specific findings a buyer or SBA lender is most likely to challenge. Knowing what to correct first is the part that matters.
What will they find in diligence?
The same records get pulled either way. The only question is whether you see them first, while there is still time to do something, or whether you find out during a re-trade when the leverage has already moved across the table.
What do I do first?
Everything looks urgent when it is all in your head. The report ranks the work by what moves the classification, so the first ninety days go somewhere that counts instead of somewhere that feels productive.
The instrument
All twenty-five criteria. Published, not withheld.
You can read the whole instrument before you spend a dollar. If a gate here already tells you where your problem is, take that and go fix it — that is a good outcome. What you cannot do from a list is score yourself honestly against your own records.
Authority
Who is allowed to decide when you are not there?
- 01Decision bottlenecking
- 02Succession continuity
- 03Signature authority
- 04Governance maturity
- 05Key relationship ownership
Process
Can the work be run by someone who was not trained by you?
- 06Procedures in daily use
- 07Training independence
- 08Exceptions and founder workarounds
- 09Quality control independence
- 10Error recurrence and post-mortems
Commercial
What protects the margin when you are not pricing the job?
- 11Pricing guardrails
- 12Discount authority and logic
- 13Contractual revenue protection
- 14Sales process independence
- 15Customer economics visibility
Revenue
Which revenue survives a change of ownership?
- 16Customer concentration
- 17Revenue mix and durability
- 18Owner-identity decoupling
- 19Lead generation system
- 20Contract enforceability and assignability
Financials
Can the numbers be reproduced by someone who was not there?
- 21Reporting cadence and close discipline
- 22Normalization integrity
- 23Debt service safety margin
- 24Internal controls
- 25Audit and data-room readiness
How it is scored
The same inputs produce the same score, every time.
Scored 1 to 4
Every criterion is scored against written anchors that describe what a 1, a 2, a 3 and a 4 look like in a real company. The anchor is the standard — not the assessor's mood on the day.
Gates carry weight
Authority and Revenue weigh 1.5. Financials weighs 1.25. Process and Commercial weigh 1.0. The gates that decide whether a deal survives count for more than the gates that decide whether it is tidy.
One finding can cap the result
A high-consequence finding — a customer at half your revenue, books that cannot be reconciled — holds the classification down regardless of the total. A good average does not wash out a fatal single item, because it does not wash it out in diligence either.
Tested against records
Scores come from what your documents support, not from what the owner remembers. Where evidence is missing, the report says so and says what would close it, rather than quietly assuming the best case.
Where you land
Weighted scores total somewhere between 31.25 and 125. That total places the company in one of four bands. The band is not a grade — it is a description of what is actually for sale.
What is for sale is your working week. A buyer is underwriting you, not the company, and will price and structure the deal accordingly.
The company is moving off the owner but has not landed. Enough is documented to start a conversation; not enough to survive a hard one.
The business runs. The remaining exposure is usually in the record rather than the operation — the thing works, but proving it takes longer than it should.
The company can change hands without changing what it is. Earnings reproduce from source records and the operation holds without you in the room.
What you get
A document you can hand to a lender, a partner, or your own manager.
The scorecard
All 25 criteria scored 1 to 4 against written anchors, with the field note that produced each score. Gate averages, weighted total, and the classification the total lands in.
The exposure summary
Which gates are carrying the risk, what a buyer or a lender finds first, and what it costs you — in price, in terms, or in the fact that you cannot leave for a month.
The correction sequence
What to fix, in what order, and why the order matters. Sequenced by what actually moves the number rather than by what is easiest to start.
The fee
Big firms bill for structure. We bill for the deliverable.
A large firm's price includes everything it takes to run a large firm. A fixed fee means we are done when the work is done.
Market context: independent QoE-lite reviews for small businesses are published at roughly $6,500–$10,000 and up and examine financial diligence alone; a full QoE runs higher. Tier I covers five gates — financials among them.
After Tier I
The report decides the next step. Not a sales call.
Tier I stands on its own and nothing is committed beyond it. Some owners take the correction sequence and work it themselves with their own team. That is a legitimate use of the report and it is the outcome we design for.
Get a read on your own company first.
The owner test is ten questions across the same five gates. It takes five minutes, scores instantly, and will tell you which gate to look at before you spend anything. Start there.