The situation
I was brought in with one mandate. Prepare the business for acquisition and push the valuation up. That meant tighter production workflows, AI in the day-to-day, and a new market.
An agency is a hard thing to sell. What a buyer is acquiring is mostly people, relationships and habits, and all three walk out of the door if they want to. The numbers a buyer trusts are the ones that keep happening when the founder is on holiday. So the work was never really about dressing the company up for sale. It was about making the company produce the same result without the same people holding it together by hand.
What I did
I worked with the CEO on a plan built around profitability. Cutting costs while expanding, which is harder than doing either one alone, because the cuts have to land in the places that are not carrying the growth.
We entered the Nordic market. I put a performance dashboard in place for every department, so that each one could see its own numbers weekly rather than waiting for a quarterly review to find out it had drifted.
Then the manual work. A pile of disconnected Excel sheets became one automated system with Copilot. ChatGPT went out across the team, with the training to go with it, because a licence nobody knows how to use is a cost, not a tool. Zapier connected marketing to HubSpot so lead handoffs happened without anyone chasing them.
And I coached my seven direct reports through all of it. That part is not decoration. In a sale, the leadership layer is what the buyer is really buying, and a team that has been told what to do for a year cannot run the company the week after the deal closes.
The result
- Profitability up 20%
- New sales leads up 50% after the Nordic launch
- Departmental target achievement up 25%
- Manual task time down 40%
Why it worked
The order mattered. Cost discipline first, because it is the fastest thing to move and it buys the credibility to do everything else. Then the dashboards, so every department could see its own performance without being asked. Then automation, once it was clear which processes were worth keeping. Automating a bad process just produces the wrong answer faster.
The Nordic launch came last, on purpose. A new market is the most expensive thing on this list and the easiest to get wrong, and it only makes sense once the machine behind it can absorb the extra volume.
Underneath all of it is the same principle. Every hour of manual work is a person holding the company together with their hands, and a buyer cannot see that hour on a spreadsheet. They see it in diligence, when they ask how something happens and the answer is a name.
If you are selling in the next two years
Start with the question a buyer will ask about every process in the business: what happens to this if the person who does it leaves? Anywhere the answer is uncomfortable is where the valuation is leaking.
Then look at your own week. If decisions still route through you, the company has one point of failure and it is sitting in the founder's chair. That is the discount, and it is the one nobody writes down in the offer.
A buyer is not paying for what you built. A buyer is paying for what it produces without you. Valuation work is operations work, and it starts long before the term sheet exists.