$12M$20M
Same company. Same owner.
A client came to us with offers already on the table at $12 million. The prepared outcome we are driving toward is $20 million. The difference is the work done before the market ever sees it.
Industrial Distributor
New46 questions to answer before you sell
You deserve more than a last-minute exit.
Most M&A advisors show up when it’s time to sell. We start while you can still change the outcome.
Step two is your free Exit Readiness Assessment: all 41 factors, scored together with you.
Every business can have an exit. Not every business leaves a legacy.
- Part of
- 25+closed transactions
- Combined value
- $750M+across those deals
- Average uplift
- 30%from preparation
Trusted by top firms around the world
Why it matters
Most owners will sell once. Most are not ready.
76%
of Canadian owners plan to exit within ten years.
1 in 10
have a formal succession plan.
39%
say the business relies too heavily on them.
20 to 30%
of businesses taken to market actually sell.
Sources: CFIB, Succession planning report, 2023; Exit Planning Institute, State of Owner Readiness.
Selling a business can be brutal. You spend years building something real: customers, employees, reputation, momentum. Then one day the exit conversation shifts from “someday” to “now,” and your life’s work gets questioned, priced, and negotiated.
In that moment, being unprepared is expensive. Every advisor has an opinion. Every buyer has a narrative. Without preparation, you negotiate from urgency instead of strength.
We have seen it too many times: good owners with good businesses getting outcomes that don’t match the years of sacrifice. The answer isn’t a faster process or a bigger rolodex. It’s readiness, built over years, so you leave on your terms, at your price, with your legacy intact.
The real reason
Why good businesses sell for less than they’re worth.
- Buyers price risk.
- A buyer is not paying for your past. They are paying for the next five years without you, and every uncertainty comes off the multiple.
- Risk takes years to remove.
- Management depth, clean financials, a spread customer base, documented systems. None of it can be installed in the ninety days before a sale.
- Most owners never prepare.
- They run the business at full speed until the day they decide it’s time to sell. An offer arrives, or a health scare, or simple fatigue. By then the price has mostly been decided, and the owner negotiates from urgency.
The epiphany
A business isn’t sold at the table. It’s sold in the years before you get there.
Even if you never sell
Preparing to sell is not the same as selling.
The work that makes a business valuable to a buyer is the same work that makes it better to own. Managers who decide without you. Numbers you trust. Customers who stay because of the company, not because of you.
Owners who prepare get their time back, sleep better, and protect their family if something happens unexpectedly. Some of them decide not to sell at all. That is a good outcome too.
How it works
From first call to close, and past it.
Every engagement follows the same path. The only thing that changes is how much of the work we carry.
00AssessmentFree for every owner
A 41-factor score of where your business stands and what a buyer would find today.
- Your Legacy Readiness Score across all 8 pillars
- What a buyer would find today, and what it would cost you
- Your place on the Flight Path, and the first moves to make
Everyone gets this, whether or not we work together.
01FoundationExit preparation
A real management team, alignment, a meeting rhythm, and reporting you can trust.
- A leadership team with clear accountability
- Shareholders and family aligned on the goal
- A weekly and monthly meeting rhythm
- Reporting you can trust
02PerformanceExit preparation
The value work. How much runs through you, customer concentration, margins, depth.
- Less of the business running through you
- A customer base spread wider
- Margin and pricing work
- Depth behind every key role
03PackagingExit preparation
Clean financials, the data room, the equity story, and your personal and tax readiness.
- Financials ready for a quality of earnings review
- A data room built before it is needed
- The equity story a buyer will believe
- Your personal, tax, and estate readiness
04Sale ProcessThe sale
We run the full process to close, with deal partners brought in at each stage.
- Buyer outreach that creates competition
- Indications of interest and management meetings
- Letter of intent and negotiation
- Due diligence through to close
05TransitionAfter
We stay through the handover so your team and your customers land well.
- A handover plan for your people
- Customer and supplier introductions
- Support through the transition period
Who we serve
Founder-owned Canadian businesses, one to three years from a sale.
Typically $1M to $10M in EBITDA, run by an owner who would rather sell once and sell well. Manufacturing is where we spend most of our time. The path can be a sale to a third party, to management, or to the family.
A buyer has already called.
Friendly tone, real money, gentle urgency. You want to know what the business is really worth before you answer.
The next generation chose their own lives.
The succession plan you never wrote now has one path left, and it deserves to be designed.
Time has become a constraint.
A birthday, a doctor’s advice, a partner who wants out. The question changed from whether to how well.
You simply want it to run without you.
You may never sell. You would like to know you could, at a price that reflects what you built.
A sale fell through.
A process stalled in diligence, or an offer was cut at the last minute. The value is still there. It needs to be recovered properly.
Partners want different things.
One shareholder wants out, another wants to grow. A plan everyone can sign keeps the business, and the relationships, intact.
Two ways to sell
A co-pilot sits in the right seat for the whole flight.
We help you steer the business toward a better outcome. Then we land the sale, and we stay until your people are settled.
- Shows up
- The usual way: When you decide to sell
- With a Co-Pilot: 1 to 3 years before the sale
- Starts from
- The usual way: The business as it is today
- With a Co-Pilot: The business a buyer will pay the most for
- Your gaps
- The usual way: Found by the buyer, then priced against you
- With a Co-Pilot: Found and fixed before a buyer ever looks
- Readiness
- The usual way: A valuation and a feeling
- With a Co-Pilot: A scored framework, updated every quarter
- Gets paid
- The usual way: When a deal closes, any deal
- With a Co-Pilot: To prepare you, not only to close a deal
- Leaves
- The usual way: At closing
- With a Co-Pilot: After the handover is done
Track record
A sample of outcomes.
Three live engagements from a longer list. Most of our clients never appear publicly, by design.
$5M$25M
Built to run without its founder.
An owner-dependent business, being rebuilt with a real team and a repeatable sales engine before it goes to market, so buyers compete for a company, not a job.
Metal Fabricator
$70M$100M
The story, finally told properly.
A strong business whose value is hidden by its reporting. Clean financials and a prepared data room will let buyers bid on its strengths instead of discounting for risk.
D2C Brand
Who leads the firm
“I left traditional investment banking because I couldn’t keep doing the deal the firm needed instead of the one the owner deserved.”
For years Bhavin sat on the banking side of the table. He watched owners get pushed into transactions they shouldn’t have taken: wrong buyer, wrong time, money left behind. The reason was almost always the same. The firm got paid when the deal closed, so the deal closed.
Often the right advice was to wait, fix the two or three things a buyer would punish, then go to market worth more. Legacy Matters is built on that advice. Today the firm works inside founder-owned companies across Canada, preparing each one for the day it changes hands.
Bhavin Parmar
How we work together
Three ways in. How involved we get is your choice.
Every engagement starts with the free Exit Readiness Assessment. We usually recommend starting with the first level and moving up only if you need more hands.
DIYWhere we recommend starting
Do it yourself
You and your team do the work. We set the direction and keep score.
- Best for
- Owners with a capable team and the time to execute.
Includes
- Weekly one-hour strategy call
- Monthly readiness review and next priority
- Quarterly valuation and market review
- Introductions to specialists as needed
DWYLevel 2
Done with you
We dig in beside you and do the investigating.
- Best for
- Owners who want the analysis done and the answers brought back.
Includes
- Everything in Level 1
- We gather the data and bring back findings with a way to execute
- Direct access to your management team
DFYLevel 3
Done for you
We work inside the business and drive the change.
- Best for
- Owners who want change driven from inside the business.
Includes
- Everything in Level 2
- We work with your managers and hold people accountable
- Standing access to our operating experts
Resources
Resources for owners thinking ahead.
Tool46 cards
What Remains
46 cards, one question at a time, for owners who will one day step away. Set aside the ones you can’t answer with confidence. Your pile is the point.
Draw the first cardInsight6 min read
What a buyer sees when they walk your floor
You see thirty years of decisions that worked. A diligence team sees five risks, and prices every one of them.
Read the insightBlog5 min read
Why you should prepare to sell, even if you never do
The work that makes a business valuable to a buyer is the same work that makes it better to own.
Read the blogQuestions
Common questions
I’m not planning to sell for years.
That is exactly when this should begin. The decisions that set the price look optional at the time. By the time a sale feels urgent, much of the leverage has already left the room. Preparation is the one part that cannot be rushed at the end.
My accountant and lawyer handle this.
Keep them. You will need them, and we work alongside them, never around them. We also bring in deal partners, including lawyers, accountants, and lenders, at the stages where they are needed. What nobody in that room is doing is spending years making the business itself worth more to its eventual buyer. That is the seat we sit in.
Buyers already call me.
Take the calls. Just know your numbers, your gaps, and your walk-away price before you do. A buyer does this professionally. You will do it once.
What does it cost?
The Exit Readiness Assessment costs nothing. After that, fees depend on which level you choose and how much of the work we carry. We discuss them once we have scored the business and you can judge whether we are worth it. We will never quote a fee before then.
Your firm is young. Why should I trust you?
The firm is young. The experience is not: years on Bay Street and part of more than 25 closed transactions since 2015. And the work is live. We are inside companies right now, doing what this site describes, and we are glad to show you what that looks like.
Next step
The biggest deal of your life shouldn’t be left to chance.
Start with a 30-minute conversation. Then your free Exit Readiness Assessment, a working session where we score the business together.
- BeforeYou reflect on what you want.
- In the callWe ask the questions a buyer would ask.
- NextThen, your free Exit Readiness Assessment.
Not ready to talk?
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