The First Thing a Buyer Sees Should Not Identify You

Four documents carry a sale, and the order you release them matters as much as what is in them.

Prepared properly, they take a buyer from curiosity to a number on paper while giving away almost nothing you cannot afford to have known. Prepared badly, or released in the wrong order, they hand your competitors a free education.

The order a buyer meets them

A thin description first. A confidentiality agreement second. The full document third. The backup alongside it, with names stripped out. The names themselves last, after a buyer has committed to a number.

All four should exist before you contact anybody, and you do not write them in that order: the thin description is a distillation of the full document, so the full document has to exist first.

The thin one is deliberately thin

Also called a one pager, or a teaser. Its job is to let a buyer screen themselves without letting them work out who you are.

That is a fine balance, and the error should always fall toward saying less. Enough about size and sector for a buyer to know whether this is in their range; not enough for anybody in your industry to put a name to it. What belongs in it is a brief description of what the company does, a general location, revenue and owner earnings with a short history, a current recast balance sheet summary, and the reason for selling.

The earnings figure here is recast, which means presented as owner earnings. The unadjusted number understates almost every owner-run company, and publishing it is how an owner discovers their business looks half as profitable as it is.

What the thin document is actually for

Owners consistently underuse it, and the reason is worth stating plainly: a one pager is how you find the buyer you did not think of.

If you only approach a list you compiled in advance, you are limited by your own imagination about who might want this. A document that identifies nobody can go to a wide audience at very low risk. The buyer who pays the most is frequently not on the list you would have written.

It also works in the other direction. Once a buyer responds to it, you have something to trade. They want to know more, which gives you standing to ask who they are before you tell them anything further.

Then the full document, to very few people

The full document goes only to buyers who have been screened, have signed the agreement, and have heard a short verbal description of the business first. That verbal step costs ten minutes and removes a surprising number of people.

Its job is to let a serious buyer understand the company: what it is, what it is good at, where it is weak, and what it could be. Accurate includes the weaknesses. A buyer who discovers a problem later that the document concealed will reprice everything, including the parts that were true.

Some information is held back at this stage and should be. Customer names, supplier names, and employee names are not needed to evaluate a business, and they are the most dangerous things in the file.

Write it for the buyer, not about the company

Different buyers are buying different things. The full document is where that stops being an observation and becomes a document.

The facts do not change. What leads, what gets three pages, and what gets a line should. One buyer is pricing your customer base, one your production capacity, one the fact that you operate where they do not. The same document sent to all three is read correctly by at most one of them.

The backup, stripped and then not

Everything held back sits in a supplemental package: the evidence behind what the full document summarized, plus the material a buyer will ask for during their investigation anyway.

Often it goes out alongside the full document in anonymized form, with customer and employee names removed, so a buyer has enough to put a number on paper without learning who your people and your customers are. The named version comes after they have.

Assembling it takes longer than any owner expects, and the time to do it is while nothing is urgent. A buyer who asks for the receivables aging and waits eleven days has learned something about the company, and it is not good.

Who a buyer may meet, and when

The staging that governs documents governs people too, and this is the part owners give away first.

You can meet buyers yourself at this stage. The rest of your team cannot. An owner who wants to sell is the one person whose interest in a sale is already settled, so a conversation with them spends nothing you have not already decided to spend. Everyone else is an employee who does not know the company is for sale, and a buyer who meets them has learned something about your business and told your staff something about their future, in one move.

What getting the order wrong costs

The sequence is the protection, and each step asks the buyer to give something before they get something.

Collapse it and the protection goes with it. An owner who sends the full document to an impressive caller has not lost a file. They have lost the only leverage that existed before anybody made an offer, and they spend the rest of the process negotiating from behind without ever being able to point at the moment it happened.

More on this: The Agreement Is Not the Protection. The Order Is..

---

This is what we do. Prism Edge builds all four documents before anyone is contacted, writes the full one differently for each kind of buyer, and controls what gets released at which stage and to whom. The thin document then goes out widely, which is how the buyer nobody had on the list gets found.

The full chapter on what you show and when is in The Business Sale, free to download here.