Ready2Exit Business Hub

Ready2Exit Business Hub Ready2Exit helps strategic buyers acquire the right business off-market with clarity and confidence and supports owners preparing for high-value exits.

Based in Brisbane, serving clients Australia-wide.

02/09/2026

If you are buying a business to sit under management, you are probably reading the wrong number.

We see this play out constantly, with new buyers and experienced ones, and it costs real money.

There are two main figures used by brokers and sellers to represent the value of a business. Seller's Discretionary Earnings, usually shortened to SDE, and EBITDA. They are not interchangeable, and which one applies depends entirely on what you intend to do with the business after settlement.

SDE is the correct number if you are going into the business as the owner operator. It represents what is left at the end of the year for you, after all expenses. In that case the owner's wage is added back, along with one off or non recurring items. That is reasonable, because you are the person doing the work that wage was paying for.

If you are looking for a business to sit under management, SDE is not your number. EBITDA is.

EBITDA carries the true cost of that business being operated by someone other than the owner. The owner is removed, none of their costs sit on the profit and loss, and what remains is the genuine profit at the end of the year.

Read SDE as though it were EBITDA and you are paying a multiple on a wage you are about to have to pay someone else. On a three multiple, an owner wage of $120,000 that has to be replaced is $360,000 of purchase price that should never have been paid. Then you still have to fund the manager out of a profit that was never as large as the advertisement suggested.

You pay for it twice. Once at settlement and again every month afterwards.

Buyers, has this caught you out? Comment DEAL below.

01/09/2026

Most owners only learn what actually creates value in a business after they have already sold one.

Stuart sold his first business many years ago and left money on the table. Looking back there were two reasons for it.

The first is that he did not properly understand the elements that create value inside a business. Knowing how to run one and knowing what a buyer is paying for are two different skills, and most owners only ever acquire the first.

The second is that the focus was entirely on the outcome. Getting the tick in the box of having sold, rather than getting the best result available from the sale. When all of the attention sits on being finished, you accept things you should have pushed back on.

The second time was materially better, because the work happened well before going to market.

He removed himself from the day to day as much as possible, so what the buyer was assessing was a business rather than a person.

He limited customer concentration, so no single client leaving could take a hole out of the business after settlement.

He made sure systems and processes existed that a new owner could pick up and leverage, rather than something they would spend six months rebuilding.

And he made sure there was a foreseeable projection of revenue and profit sitting in front of the buyer, not just trading history behind them.

That last point is the one most sellers miss. Buyers pay for history. What they are committing to is future profit, and they need to see it before they will pay for it.

If you are a few years out from an exit, the work starts now. Comment EXIT below.

31/08/2026

The most expensive mistake sellers make is leaving preparation until they have already decided to sell.

A lot of owners assume preparing a business for sale takes a couple of weeks. Tidy the office, freshen it up, put it on the market.

It does not work that way. Particularly in small to medium businesses, if the business is owner operated there will be a number of things done every day that a buyer will read as high risk. None of them get fixed in a fortnight.

The biggest one is removing the owner from the business as much as possible.

Owner operators consistently underestimate how involved they are, because it has become part of everyday life. Taking client calls after hours. Sitting across admin and bookkeeping. Overseeing the team. Very often doing delivery on top of everything else.

From a buyer's perspective that is high risk, and stepping out of it properly takes months rather than weeks.

Then customer concentration. What share of revenue sits with your largest clients, and what can be done to dilute it. Bringing on new clients. Growing the spend of smaller ones. Both work, both take time.

Then the financials. If someone saw these numbers for the first time today, could they understand what is happening in this business. Is it obvious what is profit. Are there muddy expenses a new owner will never carry.

Cleaning that up takes months, and a runway of clean financials speeds up the entire acquisition process later.

A prepared business is a sellable business. Comment EXIT below and we will tell you where to start.

29/08/2026

Buyers who start looking before they set their criteria lose months on deals that were never going to work.

It is one of the most common things we see, and it is entirely fixable in an afternoon.

Without specific criteria there is no direction. A buyer moves from listing to listing, industry to industry, and it feels productive because they are busy. Six months later they have looked at forty businesses, made offers on none, and are no closer than the day they started.

The first step we take every buyer through is defining the buy box.

Industry comes first. Where do your experience, skill set, qualifications and network give you an unfair advantage that other buyers will not have. That is where you should be hunting, rather than wherever the listings happen to be that week.

Then the profit number. What does the business need to produce to pay you the income you expect to take out of it.

Then debt servicing. If you are funding the acquisition through debt, is the business expected to service it.

Then management. If you intend to put an operator in rather than run it yourself, what does that cost sit on top of.

Work through that and you have a baseline net profit number. Apply the multiple for the industry you are targeting and you have an approximate price bracket. From there you resolve funding.

The real gain here is not focus. It is speed. When the criteria are set, a deal that misses one gets a no on day one instead of week six.

Comment BUY BOX below and we will reach out.

26/08/2026

Sometimes the honest answer is that there is no business to sell.

An owner came to us recently after fifteen to twenty years running her business. Her circumstances had changed and she was ready to move into the next phase of her life. Completely reasonable position to be in, and she deserved a straight answer rather than a polite one.

Everything she told us at the outset was positive. Great customers. Great staff. Family members working in the business and working well. On the surface it sounded like a solid operation with a real story behind it.

The more the conversation went on, the clearer it became that the fundamentals were not there.

She was working sixty hours a week, six days, and was not paying herself a wage. Worse, there was no profit left at the end of the year to pay herself a dividend either.

So she has been working a full time job and a half, for free, for years.

No buyer is going to pay for that, because there is nothing there to buy. What is actually on offer is the owner's labour, and the moment she walks out the door there is nothing left standing behind her.

We had to tell her we could not help.

We decline mandates like this deliberately, and it is not about being difficult. It is not fair on a seller to run them through months of process that ends in nothing. And it is not fair on buyers, whose time is worth more than being walked through something that was never transferable.

The hardest conversations in this business are not about price. They are about what twenty years of work actually built.

Comment EXIT if you want a straight assessment of yours.

24/08/2026

The smaller the business, the more add-backs you will find. The more you find, the harder every single one has to be tested.

Add-backs are a completely normal part of any acquisition, particularly in the small to medium space. If a business is owner operated there will always be items running through it that a new owner will never spend. The personal phone. Often the personal vehicle. A list of other things sitting quietly inside the financials.

None of that is unusual and none of it is automatically a problem. What matters is that every line can be verified, because what a buyer is paying for is legitimate profit and nothing else.

Here is the part buyers consistently underestimate.

It is in the seller's interest, and the broker's interest, to add back every dollar they possibly can, because every dollar added back is paid at a multiple. On a three, one dollar added back is three dollars added to the price they receive.

That is not dishonesty. It is how the structure works, and any buyer should assume the incentive is switched on in every deal.

We are working on a mandate at the moment with a healthy level of profit and a significant volume of add-backs. It has been accepted on face value to reach a term sheet, but due diligence on that profit will be detailed and stringent.

The reason is simple. The buyer lives with that number for the next decade. The seller lives with it until settlement.

Buyers, what is the worst add-back you have had to chase down? Comment DEAL below.

22/08/2026

An advisor who has never told you your price is too high is not protecting your interests. They are protecting the mandate.

This is one of the main reasons we decline sales mandates, and it is worth explaining why.

A recent conversation is a good example. Twenty years in business, a genuinely solid operation, and we have no argument with the quality of what the owner built. The number he had in mind was three times what any buyer in the real market would pay for it. That is how the conversation went and that is how it ended.

We will always push for the strongest price achievable. That is the job and we work hard at it. But taking on a mandate priced well outside reality does not help the owner. The listing does not sell. It sits on the market, goes stale, and a stale listing is considerably harder to move than a fresh one. The owner ends up worse off than if nobody had listed it at all.

We saw the same problem from the other side of the table recently. We were acting on the buy side for a client. Good business, genuine IP sitting in it. The seller had engaged an advisor who gave him an inflated understanding of what it was worth.

We could not reach an agreement, so we walked away and acquired a stronger business for our client instead.

That first business is still trading. Same owner. Same price. Very unlikely to sell in its current state at that number.

Honest advice early costs an owner nothing. Flattering advice early costs them years.

If you have been given a number that did not stack up, comment EXIT below and tell us what happened.

20/08/2026

Buyers work through a business in the same order every time, and price is not where they start.

This surprises a lot of sellers, who arrive at the first conversation braced for a negotiation about the number and find themselves being asked about something else entirely.

Across the mandates we assess, the first thing a serious buyer tests is transferability. If we remove the owner today, what is still standing. What breaks. Where does the hole open up, and who is filling it on day two. Almost every question in that first conversation is pointed at that.

Price only surfaces early if it is well outside what the market pays, and at that point the conversation generally ends rather than begins.

Once a buyer is satisfied on transferability, they move to the quality of the revenue.

Customer concentration comes first. If a small number of clients carry most of the income, then one of them leaving after settlement is a hole the new owner inherits. That gets priced as risk regardless of how strong the relationship looks today.

Then the shape of the revenue. Is it recurring or project based. What contracts are in place. What renews on its own and what has to be won again every year.

There are other things buyers assess, but nearly all of it resolves to a single question. How much of this revenue and profit is still here twelve months after handover.

Sellers are not assessed on what they built. They are assessed on what survives without them.

Sellers, what caught you off guard in a buyer conversation? Comment EXIT below.

19/08/2026

The lowest priced business on the market is almost never the lowest risk one.

It is one of the most common assumptions we correct when we start working with a first time buyer. They have not run a business before and they have not bought one before, so the instinct is to start small. Keep the numbers modest, keep the downside contained.

The logic is sound. The financials underneath it usually are not.

Take a business presenting $190,000 at the end of the year. On paper that reads as a decent wage and a bit left over. Normalise it properly and the picture changes. What would it cost to pay someone at real market rate to do what the owner does. How many hours are they genuinely working. How many roles are they covering that have never had a number put against them.

Run it honestly and there is frequently nothing left.

At that point the buyer has not acquired a business. They have acquired a full time job, often more than full time, paying less than the job they walked away from to do it.

Two things settle this before you inquire on anything.

How many roles the current owner is covering, and what each of those would cost to replace at market rate.

And how they are paying themselves. Is it a wage sitting on the profit and loss, or is it dividends and whatever survives to the end of the year.

Until you have those two answers, the profit figure in the advertisement tells you very little.

Buyers, have you run this exercise on a listing and found the number did not hold? Comment DEAL below.

09/07/2026

Not all business brokers are your ally.

Running Australia's largest business marketplace, we hear it constantly. Owners paying an upfront fee and never hearing from the broker again. Locked into a contract with not one introduction to a qualified buyer. Promised the world, delivered nothing.

It costs more than money. Owners with one foot out the door stop focusing on the business, performance slips, and the value of the business slips with it. They end up worse off than when they started.

Choosing the right advisor matters. Interview them properly. Speak to people who have worked with them. Ask what they have actually achieved, and who for.

Brokers are like lawyers and accountants. There are great ones and there are terrible ones. Find the right one for you.

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Brisbane, QLD
4064

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