The Sellability Stack™ – Our Model for How to Make Your B2B Business Sellable

Sellable Is Not the Same as ‘For Sale’

Most founders we work with aren’t building their business to sell.

They often say it early in a conversation, sometimes defensively, sometimes proudly. As if the idea of sellability implies disloyalty – to their team, their clients, or the thing they’ve spent years building.

We understand that instinct. When you’ve poured years of energy into a B2B business, when it’s grown out of your reputation, your relationships, your judgement, it doesn’t feel like a disposable asset. It feels personal. Walking away can feel like giving something up rather than realising value.

But here’s what decades of building, selling, investing in and advising B2B businesses has taught us:

The founders who insist they’re “not building to sell” are often the most exposed when circumstances change.

Markets shift. Energy dips. Life intervenes. Growth slows. Opportunity appears, or disappears. And when sellability hasn’t been designed into the business, options narrow very quickly.

Sellability isn’t about exiting.
It’s about choice.

It’s about building a business that can be scrutinised, understood and transferred – even if you have no intention of stepping away. In fact, the most sellable businesses we’ve been involved with were often the least desperate to sell. They had leverage precisely because they didn’t need a deal.

We’ve seen exits fail at the last minute not because the price was wrong, but because the business couldn’t explain itself clearly. We’ve watched buyers get nervous not because performance dipped, but because too much value sat with one individual. And we’ve seen founders end up locked into long earn-outs and handcuffs because sellability was left too late.

This isn’t about stripping out personality or turning your business into something soulless in pursuit of a multiple.

It’s about building something robust enough to stand without you, while still allowing you to remain deeply involved if you choose.

True sellability doesn’t remove the founder.
It simply stops the business depending on them.

And it starts much earlier than most people think.

1. Sellability Starts With Positioning (Not Numbers)

When founders think about sellability, they usually think in numbers.

Revenue.
Growth rate.
EBITDA.
Client count.
Pipeline coverage.

Those things matter, but not in the order most founders assume.

Scaled Founder, Simon Penson has sat on both sides of the table many times and he will  tell you that buyers form an opinion about a business long before the spreadsheet comes out. Often within the first thirty minutes of a conversation.

That opinion isn’t about performance.
It’s about clarity.

Simon has been in meetings where a business with modest revenue commanded serious interest because it could explain exactly what it was, who it was for, and why it won. And he’s seen much larger businesses struggle because, beneath the numbers, they were hard to categorise.

Buyers are constantly pattern-matching. They’re trying to place your business into a mental box they recognise:

• Is this founder-led or founder-dependent?
• Is it a specialist or a generalist?
• Is growth repeatable or opportunistic?
• Is this a strategic asset or a lifestyle business?

Once that categorisation happens, everything else follows – valuation range, deal structure, earn-out expectations, even tone. And that categorisation is driven far more by positioning than by profit.

One of the most common mistakes we see founders make is confusing capability with positioning.

They describe everything they can do. Every sector they’ve touched. Every service they’ve ever delivered. From their perspective, this breadth feels like strength. From a buyer’s perspective, it often feels like risk.

“We can work with anyone” rarely sounds attractive in a deal room.

It usually sounds like the business hasn’t made hard choices. And businesses that haven’t made choices are harder to trust.

We’ve seen this play out repeatedly in B2B services and agencies: two businesses with near-identical financials. One positioned clearly around a defined problem, audience and outcome. The other positioned broadly, proudly flexible, keen to stress adaptability.

The clearer business always attracts cleaner interest.

Why? Because it’s easier to diligence. Easier to underwrite. Easier to imagine scaling without founder heroics. The broader business often raises more questions than answers — and questions introduce friction.

This is where founders often push back. They worry tighter positioning will limit opportunity. In practice, the opposite is usually true.

Clear positioning doesn’t remove optionality.
It creates confidence.

Buyers don’t pay for abstract potential. They pay for momentum they can understand. And momentum only feels real when it’s anchored to something repeatable.

Weak positioning forces the founder to become the explanation – the translator, the glue. That might feel powerful day-to-day, but it’s fragile in a transaction. Buyers don’t want to acquire a dependency. They want to acquire a system that makes sense without constant narration.

Sellable positioning answers the big questions before they’re asked. It makes the business legible without the founder in the room. It signals that what buyers are seeing isn’t accidental, it’s designed.

And that’s the real point.

Sellability doesn’t start with making more money.
It starts with making the business easier to understand, easier to trust, and easier to imagine continuing without you.

2. Transferable Value Beats Founder Energy

Founder energy is powerful – and early on, essential.

It wins the first clients. It fills gaps. It rescues situations that shouldn’t yet be solvable. The problem comes when the business never outgrows it.

Buyers admire founder energy, but they don’t want to rely on it. The unspoken question in almost every diligence process is:

“Where does the value actually live?”

If the honest answer is “in the founder’s head, relationships or judgement,” the business may still be attractive. but it won’t be cleanly transferable. And when value isn’t transferable, buyers compensate through price reduction or control mechanisms.

That’s where earn-outs come from.
That’s where handcuffs appear.

Founders often confuse importance with irreplaceability.

• “I’m still involved in all the big decisions.”
• “Clients like dealing with me.”
• “I step in when things get complicated.”

All of that may be true, and operationally sensible, but in a transaction context it raises a different question:

What breaks if you stop doing those things?

The strongest founders don’t remove themselves. They change how they add value.

They move from being the engine to being the amplifier.

They stop closing every deal and start building the system that closes deals. They stop rescuing delivery and start designing structures that prevent issues recurring. Their judgement doesn’t disappear, it gets embedded.

From a buyer’s perspective, this is transformational.

It reduces risk.
It signals maturity.
And it makes founder involvement feel additive rather than essential.

Transferable value isn’t about stepping away.
It’s about ensuring the business doesn’t collapse without you.

3. Systems Create Trust (Not Bureaucracy)

One of the quickest ways to lose buyer confidence is to say the business “just works” because good people make good decisions.

Buyers don’t want bureaucracy.
They want predictability.

Predictability comes from systems, not heavy process manuals, but repeatable ways of working that don’t rely on memory, heroics or constant founder intervention.

When answers rely on phrases like “we just know” or “we keep an eye on it,” buyers get nervous. Not because they’re untrue, but because they aren’t auditable.

Strong systems don’t remove autonomy. They remove ambiguity.

They explain why outcomes occur, not just that they did. They allow buyers to underwrite future behaviour rather than hope it continues.

Systems don’t make a business rigid. They make it trustworthy.

And trust is worth far more than flexibility in a transaction.

4. Sellable Economics ≠ Growth at All Costs

High growth doesn’t automatically mean high value.

Buyers don’t buy growth. They buy quality of earnings.

They care where revenue comes from, how repeatable it is, how margins behave without founder intervention, and what happens when momentum slows.

Sellable economics are often boring.

They favour repeat revenue over spikes. Consistency over opportunism. Cash conversion over headline EBITDA.

The businesses that attract the cleanest deals are rarely the loudest growers, they’re the most predictable.

Sellability exists when the numbers make sense without intervention.

5. Governance Is the Hidden Value Multiplier

Governance isn’t about control.
It’s about confidence.

Buyers aren’t asking whether decisions get made. They’re asking whether they get made consistently, especially when things get uncomfortable.

Strong governance distributes confidence. It removes the founder as a single point of failure. It shows accountability exists beyond personality.

And interestingly, it often increases founder influence post-deal rather than reducing it, because buyers don’t feel the need to impose structure where it already exists.

Governance, done well, is invisible when things work and invaluable when they don’t.

6. Optionality Is the Goal (Not an Exit Date)

Sellability isn’t about preparing for a moment.
It’s about creating optionality.

When a business is well positioned, transferable, operationally trustworthy, economically sound and well governed, something shifts. Pressure reduces. Conversations change. Opportunities appear earlier and on better terms.

Optionality creates leverage – not just on price, but on structure, timing and involvement.

Founders who invest in sellability early rarely feel rushed. They can explore conversations without committing. They can say no. They can wait.

And sometimes they don’t sell at all, because the business becomes more enjoyable once it no longer relies on constant founder heroics.

Sellability isn’t a late-stage project.
It’s a way of building.

And when founders embrace that mindset, they don’t lose control.
They gain it.

That’s what making a B2B business truly sellable is really about.