Buyer readiness
Two scores: how the business compares with its industry, and how ready it is for a buyer to look closely. Both rise as the record improves.
Two scores, two questions
Readiness is measured twice. The first score compares the business with its industry, driver by driver. The second asks what a sell-side adviser would ask before starting a sale: is the paperwork, the team and the story ready?
50 is the industry median on every driver. Green is above it, orange below.
How to read it. Each bar is one score. Against its industry, 50 means a typical peer. Before a sale, each dimension names what holds it down.
Against the industry
Each driver puts the business’s own figures inside the range of similar businesses. The sample is strongest on compliance and gates (91) and owner independence (75), and weakest on earnings quality (49) and scale (50).
Each driver is the company’s own figures placed inside the band for own-platform hosted-voice providers, weighted by each input’s effect on value. Fifty is the median by construction. The score is a diagnostic: it never feeds the valuation.
| Measure | The sample | P25 | P50 | P75 | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normalized EBITDA margin | 20.0% | 8 | 16 | 25 | 60 |
| Service gross margin | 62% | 58 | 68 | 76 | 36 |
| Overhead | 33% | 24 | 32 | 42 | 50 |
| Seat growth | 7.6% a year | 0 | 5 | 10 | 63 |
| Customer churn | 4.7% a year | 5 | 9 | 14 | 77 |
| Net revenue retention | 98% | 94 | 99 | 104 | 45 |
| Largest-customer share | 7.9% | 2 | 5 | 12 | 46 |
| Carrier dependence | 50% | 40 | 70 | 100 | 67 |
| Days sales outstanding | 25 days | 12 | 22 | 35 | 47 |
Bands for own-platform hosted-voice providers. Where lower is better, the position is flipped so that higher always means stronger.
- Construction. Each measure’s position in its P25–P75 band, flipped where lower is better, averaged into its driver with weights from the input’s effect on value; the headline is the mean of eight drivers
- Never priced. Buyer-readiness is display only; the value comes from the cash-flow model and its scenarios
- Plan delivered. With the plan delivered, the score moves from 62 to 65
Before a sale process
Exit readiness scores eight dimensions from the inputs and the evidence the report already holds, so the score rises as the record improves: documented add-backs lift Financial, verified gates lift Legal, a data room with owners lifts Data room. It is tracked quarterly on the board page.
| Dimension | Score | What holds it down |
|---|---|---|
| Financial | 80 | add-backs not fully documented; no quality-of-earnings readiness file |
| Commercial | 86 | 32% of customers out of term; contract assignment clauses unread |
| Management | 60 | missing agreements for the second layer; one person holds the platform knowledge |
| Legal and regulatory | 40 | gates rest on the company’s word; public records not yet pulled |
| Operational | 45 | routing, unauthorized use and number inventory measured only by estimate |
| Data room | 15 | folder structure not yet created; owners not assigned |
| Buyer universe | 55 | consolidators named; other buyers still to be sourced by region |
| Equity story | 60 | the thesis page exists; the management presentation and references don’t |
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