How to Use This Checklist
Buyers do not evaluate businesses on ambition or on how hard the owner works. They evaluate a specific, repeatable set of operational conditions, and they do it in a defined order: can the revenue continue without you, does the operation run on process, do the numbers survive verification, and is the revenue itself durable.
The thirty points below are those conditions, grouped into six categories of five. They are written the way a diligence team would ask them, which means some of them will be uncomfortable. That is the point. Every box you leave unchecked is a question someone else will eventually answer for you, usually at a moment when it is expensive.
Check the items that are true today, not the ones that are nearly true or that you intend to be true by spring. The score is only useful if it is honest, and a low score twenty-four months before a transaction is the most valuable document an owner can hold. A low score two months before a transaction is a repricing.
There is no email gate and nothing is stored. Your answers stay in your browser. When you are done, the interpretation bands at the bottom explain what the number means, and you can print or save the completed checklist as a PDF.
The 30-Point Checklist
01, Owner Independence
02, Documentation
03, Financial Integrity
04, Revenue Quality
05, Systems and Data
06, Team and Transition
What to Do With Your Score
Work in sequence, not in parallel. The systems and data category comes first because it is the fastest to deploy and it generates the evidence every other category depends on. Documentation comes second. Owner independence and revenue quality come last, because they take quarters of operating history rather than weeks of implementation.
If you want the same assessment run against your actual operation rather than your own recollection of it, the Buildwell Score scores transferability from 0 to 100 across these categories. Most businesses we assess score under 40 on transferability.
Related reading: Exit Readiness for the full framework, Owner Dependence for the category that carries the most weight, and Diligence Readiness for what happens when these items go unaddressed.