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 makes the next one safer.
Six ways to work with me. Start with the free score. If a buyer is already in sight, start at Survive Diligence.
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
Survive Diligence
You have an offer, a letter of intent, or a listing inside 90 days. I find what the buyer’s diligence will cut, and why.
€3,500 fixed · 10 working days
03
Offer review
A buyer is at the table. I score his offer, find the traps in its structure, and set your walk-away line.
€3,000 fixed · 5 working days
04
Exit-Readiness Audit
The full teardown on your real data: Buyer-Confidence scorecard, risk register, and a roadmap sequenced by return on value drivers. For an owner 6 to 24 months from a sale.
€4,500 fixed · 2 weeks
05
Scale-to-Exit Advisory
A written retainer while you execute the roadmap. Deal-killers first, then the value drivers. By invitation after the audit.
Retainer · 12 months · five clients at most
06
Sell-Side Mandate
When the business is ready, I run the sale to a worldwide pool of buyers.
Fee schedule in writing before signing
If you sign a mandate within 12 months, the rung 02, 03 or 04 fee counts in full.
Fees are in euro, plus VAT where it applies. I send an invoice. There is no checkout.
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.
Before They Bid
Every Tuesday I send one letter to owners who will sell. One thing a buyer checks in your business, and what it does to the price.
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, in any country. 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.
- Your buyer’s safe alternative, a two-year German government bond, paid 3.25% on 30 September. That is 74 basis points (0.74 percentage points) more than on 30 June. I expect buyers to ask for the rise in an offer’s terms (payment conditions) before they cut the price.
- For your tier, the newest price report with a stated data window ends on 30 June, 96 days before my 4 October cut-off.
- On an invented business, FX cuts profit 5.2%, and two assumed cost rises take the cut to 21.2%. The claimed EUR 200,000 becomes EUR 157,698.
One email per month with the issue. Nothing else. Unsubscribe any time.
Match My Profit · Monthly
October 2026:
How to read an offer when your buyer’s money earns 3.25% elsewhere
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.
