What Do You Actually Know About The Business You're Buying?
The situation I walked into
A client came to me partway through deciding whether to buy a business. He had a seller's asking price, a set of accounts, and a meeting already in the diary. The pitch leaned hard on two things: a freehold that came bundled with the deal, and a growth story on the sales line. Neither of those told him what he actually needed to know, whether the price held up against what the business itself earns, trading, today.
What I did
I started from what's actually on the public record rather than what had been presented: the filed accounts, the ownership history, tied out against Companies House rather than taken on trust. The picture changed once it was separated from the pitch. A meaningful share of the revenue sat with a small number of relationships, so the growth on the sales line was less diversified than it first looked. I worked out what the trading operations earn on their own, stripped of the freehold and the story built around it, and what a buyer's actual return and payback would look like once financing was factored in against that number, not the asking price. Then I built the list: the specific points that needed confirming with the seller before anything was signed, the kind that only surface from checking the source, not from a sales conversation.
The outcome
Within days he had a picture nobody had handed him: the trading reality separated from the pitch, the concentration sitting inside the growth, the return and payback on the numbers that actually mattered, and a working list of the questions that needed answering before he sat down with the seller. He wrote back the same day it landed. It gave him exactly the right questions to ask, and he walked into that meeting knowing exactly where he stood.
What it means for you
Buying a business the way most people do, on the seller's account of it, is how good businesses get overpaid for and bad ones get missed entirely. A freehold and a growth line are the two things a seller leads with, because they are the two easiest things to make look good. An independent read, built from the same public record and filed accounts anyone can access, checks what's actually underneath them: what the business earns without the story, and who is really carrying that growth. If you're looking at a business, or already committed to a process, that's the gap worth closing before you're the one explaining, after the fact, what you wish you'd asked.
The Ratio Check is a free, five-minute read on where your business actually stands, and it is the best place to start.