Good investors or buyers use a “Target Identification Process” to assess how your business shows on paper – the financial statement, the balance sheets, the hard assets, and your ability to effectively communicate your purpose, your strategy, your market and your differentiation. These factors immediately and directly impact whether or not a good buyer will want to meet with you, or not.

By reverse-engineering the investor’s systemized “Target Identification Process”, and addressing each of the holes before they are identified, can be the one sole difference between a qualified buyer offering you an all-cash buy-out, or no offer at all. Therefore, it is critical that any owner hoping to sell his business in the coming years in intimately aware of the investor/buyer’s perspective and restructures their business around the 3-level Target Identification Process before selling or courting potential buyers.