Think Like a Buyer, Run Like a Seller

The moment of clarity

A friend recently described the moment that changed how he saw his business. After eighteen months preparing for a potential sale, he was sitting across from prospective buyers when one said: "Walk us through your monthly reporting process."

What followed was twenty minutes of awkward explanation about spreadsheets passed between departments, manual reconciliations, and reports that were always "nearly ready" but never quite finished. The buyer's polite nods said everything.

"You think you know your business," he told me later. "Then buyers start asking questions - and you realise how much time, energy, and money is tied up in things that simply do not justify their cost."

That conversation revealed a broader truth: most businesses would be far stronger if they operated as though they were about to be sold. If they learned to think like a buyer, and run like a seller.

James Sinclair often advises business owners to "always be getting your business ready to sell" - not because you necessarily plan to exit, but because this mindset forces discipline. It strips away the comfortable explanations you give yourself and makes you see the business as an outsider would: what would I actually be willing to pay for here?

What floodlights reveal

Preparing for a sale is like switching on floodlights. Suddenly you see the clutter you had stopped noticing.

Take a software startup I came across recently. The founders were brilliant technologists but had accumulated three years of operational debris. They still used the project management system they had chosen when they were four people sharing a WeWork desk - except now they were forty people across three offices. Critical decisions required emails to the founder because "that's how we always did it." New hires spent weeks learning workarounds that nobody could explain. What looked like a fast-growing tech business was actually a collection of increasingly expensive habits.

Or consider a professional services firm I came across. The partners had spent five years building what they called "diversified revenue streams" but what a buyer would see as unfocused drift. They offered corporate training, executive coaching, strategic consulting, and compliance auditing - all competently, none excellently. When we mapped their actual profitability, 80% of their margins came from one type of work, but only 40% of their time was spent doing it. The rest was subsidising the partners' boredom with their core business.

The cost of unpreparedness

The human cost of this lack of preparation became clear through a story a colleague shared. A small manufacturing business - profitable, well-regarded, supporting two families for over twenty years - was approaching retirement. The owners had always assumed the business would fund their later years.

But they had never prepared it for sale. Personal relationships were tangled with business operations. Key supplier agreements existed only as handshake deals. When they finally approached potential buyers, the offers were disappointing. Worse, they discovered that simply closing down would cost hundreds of thousands in lease obligations, staff redundancies, and equipment disposal.

Research from the Exit Planning Institute suggests 70-80 percent of businesses that go to market never actually sell - often because they are simply not buyer-ready. Meanwhile, as Codie Sanchez has documented, a generation of Baby Boomer business owners is reaching retirement age - creating opportunities for prepared buyers to acquire valuable but unprepared businesses at significant discounts.

The tragedy is not just financial. These owners had built something genuinely valuable but had never found the opportunity to see it clearly enough to capture that value.

The benefits of buyer thinking

Yet here is the key insight: you do not need to be preparing for an imminent sale to benefit from thinking like a buyer.

A business run as though it might be sold tomorrow is, almost by definition, a better business to run today. It will be leaner, more focused, and more resilient. It will waste less management attention on complexity that adds no value. It will be more attractive not just to buyers, but to investors, partners, and talented employees who want to join something that makes sense.

Most importantly, it will be far less dependent on any single person - including you.

Making it practical

How do you build this discipline in practice?

Start with an annual "buyer audit." Bring in someone with fresh eyes - a peer, adviser, or non-executive director - and ask them to spend a day understanding your business. What would they struggle to explain to their spouse over dinner? Where do they see unnecessary complexity?

Then apply what I call the "Wikipedia test." If someone had to write a clear, factual description of your business model on Wikipedia, could they do it in three paragraphs? If not, you probably have a clarity problem.

Focus ruthlessly on what creates scalable value and eliminate what does not. Document your core processes not because compliance requires it, but because a business that depends on tribal knowledge cannot grow beyond its current team.

Finally, build clean operational architecture: clear contracts, minimal dependencies on key individuals, and systems that work even when the founder is on holiday.

The broader discipline

The discipline of thinking like a buyer extends beyond business. Every professional should occasionally review their career as though they were being hired again tomorrow. The question is not comfortable, but it is useful.

"Think like a buyer, run like a seller" sounds like a simple maxim, but it contains a profound discipline. It forces you to see clearly, act decisively, and build something that can thrive beyond your direct involvement.

Whether you ever sell or not, that clarity is worth having.