How to prepare an Indian business before you speak to buyers
Updated 2026-11-03
What owners should organise before a sale: numbers, customers, approvals, and a clear reason for the process.
Decide what you are actually selling
Buyers price a transfer they can complete. Are you selling shares, a business undertaking, or only certain assets? Is the land in the company or in a promoter’s name? Is a key licence personal to the founder? These answers change the deal more than the headline turnover.
Write the reason for the sale in one paragraph. Retirement, a partner exit, a strategic buyer who can take the product further, or a need for capital are all understandable. A vague “open to opportunities” reads as a fishing exercise, and good buyers decline those.
Make the last three years explainable
Pull financial statements, GST returns, and a simple monthly revenue view into one folder before the first meeting. You do not need a data room of three hundred files. You need the files that support the sentence you are about to say.
Note the adjustments you expect a buyer to make: one-off income, promoter salary that is not a market cost, rent paid to a group firm, and cash expenses that never hit the books. Offer the bridge yourself. It is the difference between a negotiation and an argument.
List the consents before you promise a close
Check shareholder agreements, lender covenants, lease assignment, and any government licence that does not automatically follow a share sale. If a minority shareholder can block a transfer, that person needs to be in the conversation early.
Statutory dues, ongoing litigation, and employee claims belong on a one-page list. None of these automatically kill a deal. Discovering them in week eight does.
Choose who speaks for the company
Pick one advisor to run the process and one person inside the company who can answer facts. Everyone else should not be sending their own version of the numbers to buyers. Mixed stories are how price chips away.
Publish the deal only when that pair can support it. Deal Desk then holds the listing, the people who asked for access, and the files you chose to release. The founder does not have to forward the same PDF from a personal phone for the next four months.